If you didn’t read my blog from yesterday about the [good] mischief of visioning from 10k feet, I would encourage you to go back and read that so this one will make sense.
This is the view outside my client’s office. You can see cars and you can see clouds and you can see where the driveway leads you from the parking lot into the street. But you can’t see much beyond that.
If you need to get to Philadelphia, you can’t see the best way to get there could actually be driving to the Allentown airport and flying. Of course if you have a GPS, it gets easier, but there are still decisions to be made.
Yes, you can get to PHL faster, but then you wouldn’t have your car on the other end. And if your destination is really Tampa, FL, as mine was the other night, you wouldn’t know that it was really fastest on USAirways to go through Charlotte, NC.
Even holding a boarding pass to Charlotte in my hand, pulling out of this parking lot into the street, I couldn’t have known without calling the airline or checking on my mobile, that the flight was delayed and I would have to fly through PHL, getting home at 11pm, instead of 9pm as planned.
And if you wanted to get to Tampa before 9pm, you definitely wouldn’t have been able to see that if you would fly non-stop from Allentown to St. Pete/Clearwater airport, that Allegiant would have gotten you there non-stop.
When you do business planning at ground level just based on what you see or what you have experienced in the past (the bad kind of planning mischief), you simply can’t see each obstacle until you come upon it. And the worst thing is that you have absolutely no perspective.
Think about Google maps. When I went to Bethlehem last week, since I
had never been there, I had no idea where it was. When I first did my
search, I could see it on the map, but until I “zoomed out”, I couldn’t
see it in relation to what is around it.
Once I saw
it at that perspective (which by the way is WAY more than a 10k foot
perspective), I could see that I could even have driven to Newark to
take a non-stop to Tampa, or as I ended up doing, I could fly from
Allentown to Philadelphia to get a non-stop home.
Are
you doing your business planning focused on your strategic destination
or are you mired in where you starting from, seeing only the ground
level obstacles.
It is time to “zoom out”. That is
the best kind of planning mischief. Plan with perspective. It beats
the perils of planning at ground level every time.
Tomorrow,
we talk about planning from the ivory tower. While the height might
give you some perspective, there are definite blind spots.
Stay tuned.
Chicke