Premeditatio Malorum
Tim Sarrantonio
Generosity Experience Design | Empowering nonprofits to build a community of generosity
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Today is the first day of Generosity Xchange. It is an event that our team has been planning for months and serves as our signature event. It represents our brand's core values and ability to execute memorable generosity experiences.
And I'm scared to death that everything is going to go wrong.
Premeditatio Malorum, or the Premeditation of Evils
I've been a fan of Ryan Holiday since his book Trust Me, I'm Lying and likely he's been a low-key influence on my career for a while now. So when I started to explore his work on Stoicism, I was skeptically intrigued.
Skeptical because his association with Tucker Max gives me pause and I generally see a lot of dude bros talking about Stoicism.
In turn, the deeper reality is that there is a rich depth of philosophy, history, and lessons that apply to someone's personal and professional life. So when I came across the concept of premeditatio malorum, or the Stoic virtue of thinking deeply about the things that can go wrong in one's life to help ground our fears, it was a welcome validation of something that I've been doing for a while now.
Here's a short video that explains the concept and yes, I bought the coin and if you see me fidgeting on a call it is highly likely I am messing with this.
Meditating on event planning disaster
In the lead-up to Generosity Xchange, we had planned one final run of show review with the support team for our conference platform as well as to address any concerns people may have. After giving space for any tech questions, I asked that our team run through a Premeditatio Malorum exercise with me and speak out loud about any possible scenario that could go wrong with the event.
Here's what we came up with:
PLATFORM
SOCIAL MEDIA
领英推荐
STAFF
ATTENDEES
SPEAKERS?
MISC
Why This Helps
What about the above stands out to you?
For me, it was the fact that nearly everything on here is outside of our control. We can't control if another vendor's technology goes down or if someone says something about us that we don't like. We can't control if a major news event happens.
What we can control is our responses to those things. So we re-evaluated a bunch of our internal FAQ documents and assigned responsibilities and actions to certain people so if something happens there is a clear and efficient path to an answer.
If you've read any of my previous recap posts about the last two years of Generosity Xchange, you may know that we've gone through some things. The big difference this time is that there is a much bigger team who has been helping me and I am entering into the event with the peace of mind that we have done everything in our control to make over 1500 people as happy as can be.
Is this an exercise you have ever done at your job? Let me know in the comments section.
Last Chance!
And yes, today is the day! Please join us at Generosity Xchange if you haven't registered already. I know everything is going to be great and if you do criticize us on social, we'll have a graceful answer for you. ??