Although we often talk about Plan B in business and life, we recently discovered the benefit of a “Plan C” for facing adversity and uncertainty. As we discuss in our research in “The Upside of Uncertainty,” perhaps the hardest and most powerful tool we have for facing uncertainty is to “reframe” the uncertainty to see the possibility. But of all people, I understand how hard it can be to do this in a moment of discouragement and despair.
A friend recently taught us a great approach to reframe, and that is to lay out not just the plan B, but the plan C. Our friend had recently taken time off to follow a lifelong dream: to hike the famous Camino de Santiago, an arduous pilgrim trail through France and Spain that takes more than a month to hike. After months of planning, preparation, and a long overseas journey she arrived, stayed her first night in a hotel, and set off the next morning backpack on her shoulders for a life-changing journey. It was true she felt a little “off” that morning but attributed it to jet lag and set out with a swift pace. But within the half hour, she knew, something much more serious was wrong. She returned to the hotel and got a Covid test. It was positive.
For a week she watched other hikers and pilgrims come and go, sick and alone in a foreign country. When finally her symptoms faded, she set out again. But once more she had to return, shame-faced, to the very same hotel and check in for another week of recovery. Divorced and alone, not even started on her journey with all her best preparations drained by illness, she confessed, “Those were some of my darkest days, I didn’t know how I would make it through.” In her despair, she called her ex-husband who gave her a gift: Plan C.
Plan A had been sunk. Plan B was to wait out the sickness, recover, and restart on the trail. But Plan B felt horrible. It meant a two-week delay in a carefully planned trip. It would require making calls, pushing back commitments, and the almost unbearable frustration of not even getting started. Whenever she thought about Plan B, it made her frustrated. So what was Plan C? Our friend’s ex-husband offered to fly to France, meet her, and bring her home. “Somehow, having Plan C made living with Plan B tolerable,” she explained.
There is great wisdom in her statement and is a fresh take on one of the tools we wrote about for facing uncertainty: “Worst Case Scenario.” This is a heavily used tool in the field of psychology, which we have written about before. In essence, when we encounter uncertainty or setbacks we tend to obsess about the worst-case scenario, but only in vague and shadowy terms. If we sit down and hammer out the details of the “worst case” we realize that it may not be as bad as our shadow brain makes it out to be. Plan C is a practical way to operationalize this. Plan B is how we will adapt to a setback. Plan C is simply being realistic about how we will adapt to the worst case, and it can both give us comfort (for our friend flying home wasn’t the worst thing in the world) and give us courage for Plan B!
We recently applied this tool with our daughter who graduated from high school early to take a special four-month bread course at Parisian culinary school Ferrandi. Although she loves bread and had long wanted to explore it further, the night before her course started she melted down: she felt terrified by the uncertainty and wanted to return to high school like her friends. We laughed together a little about it as I explained, “This is precisely why we wrote the book: uncertainty and adversity always come before the opportunity. If we always run away from the uncertainty, we run away from the opportunity.” She laughed a little too, knowing it was true. Within a week, she was so happy she took the hard path, and now an internship and another job later, feels ready for university. And our friend, who got stuck at the start of the Camino eventually finished, describing the experience as a life-changing experience and even wondered, what if she had missed some of the people she met if she had started on time?
As the leader of our own life, a team, or an organization, sometimes we need to lay out Plan B but also Plan C. Laying out Plan C, with a dose of courage and resolve, can help us make it through Plan B to a better and more powerful outcome.
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