Switching from Plan A to Plan B? Stop thinking in lines — think in CIRCLES
Sometimes we have to abandon Plan A — kids come along, we’re made redundant, we get a disability, a global pandemic — but does Plan B have to mean compromise?
Plans are generally linear. Like this:
- Do this
- Then this
- Take the results of that and do this with it
- Tell everyone
- Yay finished
When you are forced to use Plan B, it can sometimes feel like this:
- Do this even though you don’t really want to
- Then this as well ugh
- Oh god there’s more
- This is zero fun
- Now what
When I was at the height of my career, I got long covid. I had been a leader in a youth charity, leading the design of inclusive programmes for diverse young people. It was a position I had worked hard to get for a decade, and I was generally going about my work proud and passionate and dedicated. Having to stop work entirely due to sickness— I am still off work — was not part of the plan.
So what do I do, now that I can’t do my job?
Well — let’s start with a different question: why was I doing my job?
I’ll tell you a story about a teenager I worked with, because I think they’re among the best people to learn from. Years ago, I was running sessions with teenagers about employability. The idea was to get them to design a career plan. Have you ever written a career plan? It’s hard, even when you have a vague idea of the industry you work in. Now, have you have asked a teenager to write a plan? About anything? Let alone for a career about which they know nothing? They didn’t know where to start, let alone where they wanted to end up.
I searched for alternative ways to inspire the young people to look at the future. I chose Simon Sinek’s “How great leaders inspire action” TED talk from 2009, because I fancied myself as a great leader inspiring action in young people. But what I found was a tool I could apply to every dilemma, in every situation. Especially, if your Plan A has messed up.
Sinek’s thesis is “people don’t care what you do, they care why you do it”. He codified the difference between Dell computers and Apple, and why Apple is the world-dominating global style brand, and Dell makes computers. The secret to the code, ingeniously, is in the shape: the Golden Circle.
As I said before, plans go one step at a time, one after the other, until the end. But by shifting your attention to where the energy for the plan is coming from, I guarantee you find more satisfaction. Working from the inside out, you establish WHY you do something, the drive, the beating heart. Your WHY is your values, your mission, what you think the world needs. Then you look at HOW you’re going to do it — qualifications, actions, tools. Then you look at WHAT that might mean you do — the job role — which may even mean pivoting to different industries.
This means that, if the WHAT suddenly changes, e.g. you’ve lost your job, you can change your WHAT without compromising the WHY. ‘Plan B’ will still serve what matters to you.
Plans are hard to start, because you have to think outside yourself, and imagine yourself reaching that goal over there at some point. But if you start within, “this is WHY I want to do this”, then your motivation stays with you always. (Using the Japanese ‘ikigai’ approach — another circle-based thought process — can really help break down your WHY).
Let’s go back to our teenagers. They don’t necessarily know what they want to be when they grow up (do any of us? Really?), but they often know what drives them. The following exchange was between me and a 15-year-old boy:
“[What I want to do is] just make money”.
“OK, why is that?” [trying to bring him into the centre of the circle, rather than just see the end result]
“So I can be rich”
“Why do you want to be rich?” [sometimes you have to ask a couple of times to get to the core motivation]
“I want to buy my mum a house”.
After blinking back emotional tears, we looked at his favourite subjects that he performed well in. We thought WHAT he could do was accountancy, HOW he’d get there would be a finance degree, and put his WHY right in the centre.
As the school year wore on, and maths exams were coming up, his energy and motivation were flagging. We took out his Golden Circle.
“What do you have to do?”
“Maths revision”
“How?”
“By just finishing this page”
“and why?”
“So I can buy my mum a house”.
Shrinking the model to this micro level helped give him perspective. He mentioned nothing about his grades or teachers or even so he could get back to his XBox; instead he connected to that beating heart, his deepest motivation for achievement as the touchstone for every step of his journey. Even if he doesn’t do the Finance degree, or Accountancy doesn’t work out, he still knows what drives him. Where could a 5-point-plan possibly have space for that?
Throughout the last decade of my career, and the last 18 months of illness, my WHY has stayed the same: I still want to support young people into a successful working life wherever they’re from. HOW I’m going to do that will have to change, due to living with fatigue. WHAT I do will have to change too, as I can not join an organisation full-time in the same way. But as long as I keep that motivation, that beating heart of WHY I do what I do, whatever WHAT I choose will still serve that mission. And that means Plan B won’t be a compromise.
