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I'm going to give you a slightly unique kind of presentation because I'm going to invite you to engage with me and interact a little bit. In a couple of minutes, I'm going to invite you to take some notes about a specific topic that I'll be suggesting, just for yourself, and you'll get maximum value out of what I'm going to share with you if you play along. In order to play, you need something to take notes with. If you already have some sort of note-taking device, that'll work fine. If you don't, underneath your seats the TEDx folks have put a pen and a blank card, which should work fine. If you use both sides of that, that's great.
I love having clear space inside of myself, with absolutely nothing on my mind, which gives me the freedom to be as much me as I can be wherever I show up and whatever I'm doing, and also to be able to trust that what I'm doing is the best thing to be doing, given my intuition and spontaneous judgments. That's a cool state to be in, so I developed some processes that really allow that to happen. That's because I needed them tremendously myself first, and then I had the great opportunity to share a lot of those ideas with a lot of people around the world.
I spent a lot of years not feeling clear and not feeling free, and having my stuff bounce me around much like a pinball in an old arcade game. One of the things, well, we teach what we need to learn the most, and I discovered that most people also have something that is hanging them up: something that they should be thinking about, something that's pulling on their attention, something that's draining their energy. Usually it's some project, some problem, some situation coming at them, and they're just resisting hopping into it and thinking about it appropriately, to be able to manage it appropriately, until of course the last minute. How many of us can relate to what I'm talking about?
I discovered the best technique for handling those kinds of things, and I've worked with the CEO of a major corporation who used it to quickly manage a strategic issue. I used it with two people who used it together to get agreement about who to invite to their wedding, and lots of things in between. Here's the cool thing: you already know how to do this. So I'm going to invite you to take a little short test drive with me on something very real in your world right now, something that you have attention on. If you think about what's on your radar, what's coming toward you (a project, an event, something you need to deal with, a speech you need to give, somebody you need to hire, a party you need to give, something you need to celebrate, something you need to organize or think about), do you have something that some part of you is thinking you ought to be thinking about a little bit more? Close your eyes just for a second and let emerge whatever most has your attention of that nature, and then in your notes, would you just write that down? Pick a topic, an event, or a project, a real thing right now that perhaps is most on your mind, that has most of your attention.
Years ago, I was quite curious about what's the best way to plan. I didn't seem to see any particular planning model that worked for everything universally and was foolproof, so I went in search of who knows how to do this. I went in search of the master planner, and I found him or her. You all know it very well: it's your brain. Now, there are some things your brain does not do very well. It forgets where it laid down your keys, and it doesn't handle trying to track more than four things at once. But there are some things your brain does brilliantly, automatically, and can't help but do, and one of them is plan. Your brain is a planning machine. You're planning all the time. You can't help but plan. You planned what to wear here today. You planned how to get here. You planned where to sit. You planned lunch. You planned what to talk to people about on the break. You can't help it. You are a natural planner, and it's going on all the time. This is probably because of evolution: over millennia, the brain figured out that planning helped with survival of the species. How do I get away from the bear coming at me? How do I get fruit out of the tree? How do I create a relationship with that attractive person? So you're doing it all the time, and over millennia it has grown to do this naturally. Even for you personally, you've been planning since you were six months old, because that's when the executive function wakes up in your forebrain, and that's when you decide to throw a tantrum to get something you don't have yet. You've been planning since then, and you're really good at this.
So I asked myself, wait a minute, what is this natural planning model that we're all using all the time? I came up with some interesting stuff. I discovered that this natural planning model is actually a recognizable five-phase model that we use, organically, to take anything from impulse into reality. Let's take a couple of simple examples to walk you through that, and then you can apply it to what you picked as a topic. See what happens.
Let's suppose that this is 30,000 years ago and you encounter this guy, or it's tonight and you're thinking about going out to dinner. What would cause you to think about anything in those situations? Well, obviously, the bear shows up. The first thing on my mind is: survive, live, no pain, all body parts intact. Dinner tonight: why would you think about dinner tonight? Well, there's nothing in the kitchen and I'm hungry, or I want to sign a business deal with a prospective client, or romance with somebody. What starts natural planning to begin with is a real purpose, some real intention, something that you need to have occur or happen.
What I'd like you to do right now is take a moment and think about whatever it is you picked as a topic or project, and answer this question very briefly for yourself in a phrase or a sentence: what is the main reason this thing exists, or what is the primary purpose of this event? Just jot down, think for a moment what that is, and jot that down. By the way, if you decide you're not writing and you just want to think about it, that's fine, but you'll come up with better and more ideas if you actually write things down.
What happens next? Next, what happens is not some detailed plan about your thing. Next, you play writer, producer, and director, and in your mind you go out to the end and produce a vision of success. What is my final ideal scenario and outcome going to be? In terms of the bear, I want to be back in my own warm cave with my mate, safe and warm. In terms of dinner, it'll be a fun evening with good food and wine, maybe a signed business deal, maybe romance, in multiple forms. You create a vision first. So take the next few moments and ask yourself: what would success mean to me for what I picked here? How would you describe it? You can develop this out later, so grab some keywords or just thoughts, quickly. Now jot down what would mean success for you with this event or this thing you picked. This will happen fast. I told you.
Now, what do you do next? Assuming you want this vision to actually occur, you're going to have to deal with an image of reality that does not match your current reality, and that creates tension in your brain. If you've imagined a reality that's not true yet, some part of you goes, "Ah, there's a delta, there's a gap between where I am and what I want." So what your brain does then is try to relieve that pressure, and it does it by generating all kinds of ideas, potentially useful or potentially relevant ideas, about how to get from here to there. It does this in somewhat random order, by the way, with no particular logical sequence; they just start to show up. What might be relevant about this situation? In terms of the bear: who, how big is the bear, how sharp is my spear, is there a tree I could run up, is it angry or is it hungry? In terms of dinner: well, I guess where we're going to go, what the weather's like, what time we'd go, who I'm going with, and whether I'm dressed okay. So what starts here, by the way, is a storm that happens in your brain by holding this picture. It's called brainstorming, exactly. So what I'd like you to do now is take the next few moments and come up with as many things as you can possibly come up with in just a few moments. Little things, big things, it doesn't matter. Jot down anything that pops into your head. Draw a line and make a huge list, or a mind map, or whatever you'd like, real quick: anything that might be potentially relevant about your project or topic.
Assuming you want to have this thing actually occur, some part of you is going to take those somewhat random ideas and start to create a structure. You're going to start to organize them, and this is where you bring your critical, logical, rational thinking to bear. You're going to evaluate: big versus little, what's the best idea, what's the first thing I need to do, what's the most important thing? Usually you'll start to structure your data based on sequences of things, or critical components, or priorities. If it's the bear, I go, "Whoa, okay, first of all, I need to see how the bear feels. I need to see how far that tree is out there, and then I'm going to slowly move that way." In terms of dinner, let's see: I need to find out if people want to go, I need to call my favorite restaurant, we need to see if they can take us, and so on. That's the kind of structuring we do. Now we can start to lay that out. What I'd like you to do is take the next few moments and just pick the three most important things you think you need to handle or deal with in terms of whatever you've picked here, two or three. If you've already written them down, circled them, or numbered them, just make a simple little plan.
Now, what do you naturally do? This may be the most important piece of the natural planning model. Assuming you want something to happen, you take all that thinking and drill it right down into: what's the very next thing that needs to happen to move this thing forward? What is the very next action? In terms of the bear, I'm going to sit still for ten seconds and watch the tree over there. In terms of the restaurant, I'm going to call the bistro and see if they can take two of us at 7:00. For your thing, if you were going to walk out right after this, and the only thing you were going to do is make progress on what you're thinking about and working on right now, what's the very next physical, visible action you would take? Is it an email, a phone call to make, a conversation to have with your boss, something to search the web about, something to buy at the hardware store? What is it? It needs to be a very specific, visible thing I could see you doing. "Set meeting" is not specific enough. How would you set the meeting, what activity? So take a couple of moments, decide what the very next action is you would need to take to make forward progress on your thing, and write that down.
How many of you actually came up with a reasonably trustworthy next action? I'm curious. Okay, cool. How many of you at least found this a constructive two minutes of thinking, and feel a little more on top of your game, a little clearer about what your stuff is anyway? Okay, well, welcome to the natural planning model.
I'm sure the burning question for many of you is, "David, so what? Here's the so what." Is the natural model the normal model? Is this how your wedding reception was planned, how your off-site was managed, how you launched your product, how your PR campaign was set up? What I've discovered is that the natural model is not necessarily the normal one. What's more normal, I've seen, is something I refer to as the unnatural planning model. What's that? Have you ever had a boss, manager, or director bring together the team because they're going to try to be collaborative? They bring you all into the room because "we're now going to think together about a problem or a project," and they approach this by saying, "Okay, who's got a good idea here?" Where does that automatically put you? You assume you are in the natural planning model, because knowing a good idea is your critical, rational, logical thinking about what's good, better, best. Where is that stage? That's stage four. In order to make sure you have the right idea or a good idea, you need to make sure the purpose has been defined, that the vision is clear, and that you've generated all the potentially relevant data that might need to be taken into consideration, before you can hope to know what's a good or best idea.
Guess what, folks? We now have the genetically modified planning model, the unnatural one. If you try to start that way, it's so unnatural that people naturally resist, and they don't play. Oftentimes it's passive resistance: they just sit on the team, or even for themselves, they do that. Then what happens is people don't really plan, and if you don't really plan, what happens? Oh, trouble: "it falleth on thy head." Did you get that? I didn't get that, I thought that. The conflict, the lack of clarity, last-minute crises, pressure, stress. No fun, right? But then people, in all integrity, say, "Okay, well, I guess we have to handle the situation," and they move into what I've discovered is the reactive planning model. What's that? First approach: let's get busy, work harder, add more people. Over time, you get busy, burned-out, stressed-out people at this thing. "Oh, hey, that is not handling it. We need to get organized, or reorganized." Okay, and then you have spreadsheets and analytical reports sprouting spontaneously out of closed offices. Somebody, at some point, realizes that a well-analyzed problem doesn't handle the problem. They say, "Well, I guess we need some more creative input. Let's bring everybody together, let's have a brainstorming: who's got a good idea?" Right, that doesn't work so well. We must have used up all of our internal creativity, dried it up on the last reorder. Well, I guess we have to get it from the outside. Time to hire a consultant. That's right, and if they're worth their salt, at some point they're going to look around and say, "Excuse me, what do you folks think you're trying to do here? No wonder we pay this consultant so much money: just straighten us out."
So, folks, it's not a matter of whether you do the natural model, but when, and at what cost. Why does this happen? From my experience, it's because the greatest human fear is the fear of being out of control, and the way that translates in our ordinary day-to-day basis is that we really don't want to be wrong or make a mistake. We hate that. Any of you hop out of bed this morning and say, "I can't wait to go be an incompetent jerk today"? No, we can't stand that. So we tend not to want to jump into anything we don't feel like we can engage with successfully. Most people don't trust they know how to plan, so let's blame somebody. It's not our fault, it's Mrs. Williams' fourth grade. For me, in the States, fourth grade is when we learned to write topical papers, and to write a really successful paper, she taught us the first thing we had to do was write an outline. The way you do that is: title at the top, with major headings, major subheadings. You can't have just one, you have to have two, and you can't have a little one without a two. You can have three, not one, and under that you're going to have sub-sub-sub headings. I looked at that and said, "Gee, that looks good, that looks great. Looks to me like if I fill this out to begin with, I should write a great report. Thanks, Mrs. Williams, for this key." So I went home that night to write an essay about my favorite topic, frogs. I sat down and froze. I don't think I ever wrote an outline first. I just wrote the report, hoped it was okay, and filled in the outline after the fact. How many of you ever did that? Yes, welcome to the basic unnatural planning model, folks. We have got to recondition and decondition that and reframe it. It's actually easy to do. Just know that at any time, because you already know how to do this, you can get on top of anything, create a lot more creative space, and take a lot of that pressure off. And don't worry, you're a natural as long as you decide to be. Thanks for listening.