Planning for the unknowns, big and small

It’s a challenging time for those of us who like to plan, who find comfort in adding items to a list or cells to a spreadsheet to be methodically addressed. These exercises can provide moments of calm retreat, when panic subsides as you remember you’ve already thought of everything and you just need to cross, cross, cross items off the list. 

But in these times, it’s impossible to think of everything. Things change too quickly, or they were too nebulous in the first place. You can’t find solace in clearing items off a list when you don’t know what items need to be on the list to begin with. 

One of my children is starting school soon. Maybe. The New York City school system plans on offering in-person learning several days per week and remote learning for the rest. I don’t know what a typical day will look like for either of us and class is in session in less than two weeks. When we learn at home, will I need to teach phys ed at the same time I host LinkedIn’s daily live show? Will I have time to write the next installment of this newsletter or will my child and I be busy working our way through a pile of spelling worksheets? I don’t know. And I won’t until it happens. 

When I can’t know the big things, which lately is often, I try to change my focus to the small ones. Was today a good mix of productive work, lunch with my kids, and maybe 10 minutes of time to myself? If yes, that’s an extremely successful day. A string of those can carry me through to a time when I finally know more about those big things.

I’ve been thinking about the big and the small of this pandemic world after the authors of two recently published books kicked off two very different conversations on LinkedIn. 

One conversation offered tangible advice for these times, something you could grasp and accomplish on your own. The other was an idea so big its proposed solutions spread across individuals, governments and entire economies. 

Laura Vanderkam challenged the LinkedIn community to take control of a small thing in our work-from-home lives that can make a big difference to our personal lives. Vanderkam has worked from home for 18 years and is the author of “The New Corner Office: How the Most Successful People Work From Home.” With so many of us working from home now as well, one of the main signals that it’s time to stop working has faded away — the daily commute. Vanderkam suggests we find a new ritual to mark the end of the work day: a walk, a phone call, or something else that fills the space that work might otherwise encroach upon. Many LinkedIn members responded to this small, achievable thing and weighed in with their own rituals. You can check them out and add your own on Vanderkam’s post here: 

Wharton professor Mauro Guillen, on the other hand, asks about something so large that each potential solution he shares feels as big as the challenge he presents.

Guillen alerts us to a looming demographic crisis in the U.S., noting that our country’s already low birth rate is likely to fall further amid the pandemic. Fast forward a decade and that means a rapidly ageing population and the economic fallout that comes with it. It’s an idea he explores in his book “2030: How Today's Biggest Trends Will Collide and Reshape the Future of Everything.” Guillen proposes several ways we might address the problem now: increasing immigration, creating incentives for people to retire later and providing universal basic income for working families that want to have children. Do you agree? You can join the conversation around this idea on his post here: 

Adopting Vanderkam’s advice may just give you the headspace to tackle Guillen’s big question. 

What authors are talking about on LinkedIn 

• MIT research fellow Michael Schrage shares a robust Q&A based on his book “Recommendation Engines,” discussing the ubiquity and stealthiness of the complex algorithms that decide what we see — and that reshape our desires in the process. 
• Jaime Schmidt, founder of Schmidt’s Naturals and author of the upcoming “Supermaker: Crafting Business on Your Own Terms” shares art from big moments on her path from making natural products in her kitchen to selling her company to Unilever just seven years later:

• London Business School professor Gary Hamel and Management Lab co-founder Michele Zanini share an excerpt from their book “Humanocracy: Creating Organizations as Amazing as the People Inside Them.”

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