Making plans and emergent strategy
Last night I got home after almost two weeks on the road. It started with a day and night in LA, working from a friend’s office during the day and visiting some old friends in the evening. The next day I flew to Montreal to meet the team at Mega, Mattel’s building brand, and their killer creative agency, Rethink, for a two-day workshop. From there I flew to Boston, rented a car, and spend the next week working from various motels by day, surfing when I could along the coasts of Maine, New Hampshire, and New York.
From 35,000 feet, everything went according to plan. On the ground they were generally much richer and better (“generally” because realizing as you’re checking into a flight, despite having done plenty of research, that you need a COVID test to enter Canada, is not especially fun).
There’s that saying “the map doesn’t map the territory” that people sometimes use when plans and reality don’t align.
Plans are like those primitive maps you see on retail store and barroom walls where things are comically out of proportion. Comically, though, only because we now know better. They must have felt pretty dang useful for 18th century sailors or fur traders.
So while I had rough plans — a sketch of a map — things became 3-D once I got to Montreal. For one, I finally got to meet some coworkers and friends I’d only seen in tiny rectangles on a screen. We ate together, we shook hands, we picked up and played with the product, we all looked at the person who was talking rather than narcissistically staring at ourselves on screen (ok, that’s just me). I’m now fully in the camp of letting online work remain online, but for discussions that lead to big decisions, it’s hard to replace to real thing.
After we wrapped on Friday I got to explore a bit of Montreal, first with our agency friends and then via a stroll around town. No amount of research could have prepared me for how a crisp September night would feel walking along Saint Laurent.
It was the same when I flew to Boston to re-do a trip I’d taken the same weekend two years ago, when I got some amazing hurricane swell at two of the best spots in New England. Finding wifi aside, a core part of the trip was finding good surf and good food. Surf would dictate where I stayed, food would dictate where I drove or walked around.
I had a rental car waiting in Boston and that was it. I was on the fence between Rhode Island and Maine until I landed and decided to first go north.
Even having been there, it felt like a new discovery. Simply steeping in the small-h history of some of the oldest English settlements in the New World was powerful. It’s hard not to imagine what life would’ve been like there in 1640, when those old maps would’ve felt like a luxurious lifeline, and when a few local ne’er-do-wells must have attempted to harness the Atlantic’s stirring energy.
Because the two swells came on the weekends, I had a spare night to spend in New York City before going to Montauk to meet some old friends. It was so energizing to be back for my first time since leaving in a hurry in May 2020. Things were falling into place very nicely.
I was reading Adam Grant’s “Think Again” on the trip and was thinking about how humbling it is to realize how little you knew before, or how biased you had been toward a certain way of doing something. But it’s also inspiring. It reminded me how much capacity we have to re-learn or more deeply learn what we though we knew. To take a perfectly good plan and let it find new space with an emergent strategy.
“When you’re managing the process of emergent strategy, you’re not telling everybody that they have this piece or that piece. What you have to ensure is that all of the employees are looking for new opportunities to grow.” — Clayton Christensen
It’s so impractical to make plans for every possible scenario that it’s almost futile. But more importantly, it’s way less enjoyable. Making maps is an important start; exploring the territory is the where the growth comes from and where we should put our energy.
