I don’t mean to imply that plans are … bad. Because they’re not.

After all, nothing happens without form. Boundaries are useful. Structure can — and should — be supportive.

And at the same time, we’re alive. And guess what? Life is a dynamic, organic, ever-changing thing of mystery and wonder.

Which is to say, you can’t plan for shit.

Of course, the act of planning can be kind of fun (and useful) — as long as you don’t get hung up on how things are actually going to happen. Because hahahahahahaha that could be a problem.

What we need here is a parable.

Or a long rambling story that might possibly bear relevance to the subject at hand. Is that a parable? God, I hope it is.

Because I want to tell you about my plan (back when I had one) for my Kitchen Table program.

The Kitchen Table was born in a vision.

September 2008. I was in Vancouver at Michael Port’s seminar (remember?), and he guided us through this semi-meditative visualization process thingy.

I dislike visualizations. Because I’m not a visual person. I don’t see stuff. I hear stuff. As you know.

But this time I did see. That my business had a massive hole in its center. A chasm.

My blog readers and my Shivanauts on one side, trying to figure out how to apply the concepts I’m always talking about here to stuff coming up in their day-to-day lives.

And my private coaching clients on the other side, who were already working with my techniques in a really deep way, and needed — I now realized — a support network other than me.

I looked at the hole.

I looked at the wholeness (also the hole-ness) of the hole. There was something beautiful and perfect about it, even though I also felt the sadness of missing.

And in an instant, I knew — no, I saw — what needed to be there.

Rising up was a bridge. A bridge that managed to be wide and sturdy, elegant and graceful, strong and flexible… all at the same time.

The bridge that launched a thousand plans.

So there I was with this gorgeous, wacky vision. Of framework and structure for an intentional community where people would commit to playing with what I teach and working on their stuff. For an entire year.

My head was exploding with curricula and itineraries and possibility.

And then I went home and started planning my ass off for the next several months until it opened.

I hired consultants. And coaches. And spent hours on the phone with friends and colleagues.

Oh yes. I filled entire notebooks with bits and pieces of plan. Overdoing it to death.

Useful because the act of planning was calming for me. But were the plans themselves useful? Not even slightly.

Even a rambling stream-of-consciousness post can have examples!

Example #1: planning ways to guarantee an active forum.

One of the things I was most concerned about when it came to turning my vision into a reality was awkwardness.

I have been involved in all kinds of online communities, and it so often seems as though it’s really just a few people who are really active, and everyone else just kind of hovers at the edges.

My brain decided that we needed to start planning — desperately — to come up with ways to avoid that situation. How would we make our forum an active one?

Blah blah blah. Months of consulting with the consultants. Back-up plans! Contingency plans! A plan for scenario X. A plan for scenario Y.

You already know what happened, right? My people are verbose and irrepressible and can’t stop posting even if you were going to beg them to. (yay!)

It’s been over a year since I opened the Kitchen Table.

And since day one, we’ve had an insanely active forum environment with hundreds of posts each day. So of course the real problem (the one we didn’t plan for) was everyone being completely overwhelmed by the busy.

Example #2: planning the website.

Yep. Had seventeen-hundred freakouts over this one too.

For example: one of my assistants recommended a programmer and we could never get him to do what we had asked for. Or even to respond to basic requests for information.

So my complicated, consultant-planned timeline plan-plan of a plan for how this thing was going to happen over a two month period ended up being completely irrelevant.

And then Nathan yelled at me to stop throwing good money after bad (“sunk costs! sunk costs! sunk costs!”) so I got my gentleman friend to find someone on elance who could build the site.

And bam. $250 and a day and a half later we had the website.

So the plan: not so helpful. But the “crap our plan doesn’t work” thing forcing us to find an emergency plan ended up being pretty great though.

Also, having friends like Nathan who are always right. I love you, Nathan!

So. A conclusion of sorts. And structure’s secret lover.

It’s kind of like this:

Plans aren’t that stable, but planning is fun and powerful.

Why? Because planning gives us the opportunity to hang out with what we want more of. The qualities that will be most useful in meeting the needs behind the plan.

So planning is good as a practice. One that gives you a structure in which you can interact with what you want and need.

And it’s really good for practicing sovereignty (being the king or queen of your own fabulous kingdom or queendom).

If planning can help you have a more conscious, intentional relationship with yourself., yay planning. Especially if you like it.

But as far as the end goal? And everything that’s going to happen along the way?

I hope you like surprises.

Because you really can’t plan for any of what’s going to happen. And getting used to that — making room in your structure for weirdness and surprises — is what lets you access flow.

Flow.
Flow is awesome. Flow is structure’s secret lover. Flow is where stuff happens.

Caveat, of course. Because how could we not?

As Paul Grilley says, people vary.

Hence the “People Vary” caveat. Different levels of plannishness can be useful for different kinds of people. You might be closer to one extreme or another on the continuum, and that’s okay.

The principles I’m talking about here — having a conscious relationship with yourself and your stuff, being aware of the relationship between structure and flow — still hold.
But how you choose use and apply this stuff?

Completely up to you. I’m not at all trying to define either your reality or your experience. Because that would be kind of obnoxious.

Oh, and the Twitter Version of this post. In three parts.

Part 1:
Like it or not, you kind of have to let a lot of things happen organically. They will ANYWAY so you might as well go along for the ride.

Part 2:
Plans = problematic. But planning = powerful stuff. Well, as long as you don’t fall in love with the result or how you’re going to get there.

Part 3:
So yeah. Next time I’m totally making flan instead.

p.s. Ha. I got through an entire post called The Illusion of Planning and didn’t make one “it’s just one guy” joke . You know, until now. Extra points for me!