One of my goals for this year was to lean into how PMPM (Practical Magic Project Management) can help when things go all sideways and crazy. First because my own life has has seen its share of personal shakeups since summer 2020, but also because… well, look around. The whole point of the Beyond Agile series is that we are in such a high chaos environment that even agile can start to break down.
In Part Two of this series I talk about how your mission / values / vision flow down through your plan and into your day to day life. This is a powerful structure for connecting the strategic to the tactical in order to manifest your best future. In fact, I have a whole huge course on how to do this using an integrated combination of magical and mundane means.
But what happens when circumstances intervene to throw you off course? You know by now that planning is a verb and an ongoing process. Still, sometimes a bomb lands in the middle of your plan and blows it up. We’re not talking “I got a rejection letter” level failure here. We’re talking about “immediate crisis” or “natural disaster” levels of plan destruction.
These things happen, and it’s hard to know what to do when they happen. First, when shit’s on fire, you need to enter triage mode to help deal with it. This is covered in my Risky Business Booklet (free when you join my mailing list) on page 7. But what about all that nice plan you been doing?
I divide the PMPM process into three sections. At the top is your strategy: your mission, your values, your vision. This is your wellspring which defines who you are and the life you want to create and helps you set goals to get there. Then in the middle is your project, which articulates what you want to accomplish. This is your water conservation and irrigation work and defines what you will water and what you will now. Out of the project comes stories that you use to drive your day to day life. At the base is action: your agile process and the habits you form that help you get shit done (chop wood, carry water). The route from your strategy all the way down to your actions is the plan.
All these pieces need to be in place and have appropriate time and place for you to give them your attention. But then, splash!, a big rocks comes along and blows up your goals or your project, redirects your actions, messes up your stories. Your project is rubble; your task list littered with urgent items that don’t have anything to do with your goals.
It doesn’t do any good to shake our fists and declare that we don’t want to do this! It’s happening. We need to do it: priorities must shift, projects be delayed. We all have our share of big rocks (and sometimes we have shared big rocks like Covid). Railing at the universe for just doing what it does is unhelpful and a waste of energy.
When this sort of thing happens, the temptation is to either fuss with the project – changing goals and shifting things around again and again to try to fit the circumstances (see deck chairs, Titanic) OR to ignore everything else entirely and just dig into the new task list and start churning away. Neither of these is very helpful. When you keep trying to rejigger your longer-term plans in the face of some disruptive chaos, you end up wasting a lot of time. Instead, admit that your goal or project changed. Delay and defer where you can and start the triage process. That said, when you just go head’s down and churn on the immediate stuff, you miss the opportunities to find potential ways out. In addition, it can make you feel hopeless, which impacts your ability to think clearly and problem solve. Remember we talked about this in Part Four of the series — keeping hope alive is critical. In addition, the first suggestion in the triage process is to stop, step back, and look around.
Where you can effectively focus during a time of plan-derailing crisis is on your wellspring: your strategy for life, your values, and your vision. By remembering who you are, you help keep coherent during times of stress. By focusing on your values, you light the paths that help you get out of your current situation with your integrity intact. And by keeping your vision for your future life in your heart, you keep from losing hope.
That doesn’t mean that crisis won’t change you. You might find your vision shifts, your priorities change, even your values can be impacted by a major life-changing crisis. But still, when you take energy from your wellspring, you are touching the source of what makes you, you. And that’s a source of power you can count on in trying times.
