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When the ground doesn’t match the map, trust the ground.
Career or business planning – mapping – is crucial to our success. Some people hate planning, claiming it slows down their action. Movement, motion – those are the activities they value most. Others love planning and spend many hours dotting i’s and crossing t’s.
RSA Animate has some terrific illustrations tethered to compelling speeches or presentations. Quite often they’re TED presentations. Here’s their YouTube channel. It’s one methodology of capturing ideas in a very engaging way. I think it can teach us some valuable things in creating our own career or business mapping.
Allstate calls this commercial, GPS Mayhem. Fitting. It’s what happens to many of us in our careers or businesses. We’re not thinking about where we’re going. We’re not trusting our senses, or even paying close enough attention to know where we’re going. GPS recalculates, shouts an instruction and we turn the wheel sharply. Not the best way to take advantage of mapping.
In a recent Mixery interview, Andrew Warner’s guest (and he wasn’t the first to confess this) admitted that he and his friends spent 2 years working on a software that nobody wanted. They were men of action. No map. No real plan. Just taking action. Unfortunately, nobody wanted what they were creating. In retrospect, they knew they’d have been far better off getting feedback – recalculating the GPS based on the reality of the ground.
Small changes in direction can make big differences. Small details often alter the course of our lives. A decision here. A different decision there. And our lives would be very different. It makes me think of those EPSN segments of sports science. A one degree change here. A one inch arm reach difference. They’re the margin of error, or victory.
Listen to the show, give me your feedback. Am I on the right road to help you?
