What's the plan?

In this episode, we explore why it’s way too early for any kind of plan - but why we need to get real good at planning…

There’s been a kind of double-theme that’s been brewing on my mind for quite a while now: ‘The Management of the Household’ and ‘The Enterprise of Life’. That’s the summary, anyway - probably the closest I can get to a tagline about all of this at present.

What’s it all about? Well, the first part is the real meaning of economics: its literal translation is ‘the management of the household’. Keeping the household clean, keeping it tidy, keeping it working, keeping the bickering between the kids at bay, making sure we don’t let them rule the roost, because otherwise they’ll wreck the whole place - you know, all that kind of thing. That’s what ‘economics’ really means.

(Sure, in a money-based possession-economy, managing the money will probably matter a bit, somewhere in there. But in reality, it’s only a tiny, tiny part of ‘managing the household’ - and probably the easiest bit of it at that, too. Anyone who thinks that economics is only about managing the money is kind of missing the point - and missing it by a lot…)

But which ‘household’ are we talking about here? Whose household? Well, that’s where the other part comes in, that bit about ‘The Enterprise of Life’ - literally, life itself as an enterprise, ‘a bold endeavour’.

What does that look like? Well, basically, everything that happens here:

The Earth seen from Apollo 17 (image public-domain via NASA)

In the whole of human history to date, only a dozen people have ever set foot on a different world - and that one was lifeless anyway. Which makes this one kind of important.

And since we don’t have a spare world to play with, we need to talk good care of this one world that we have.

Managing this household of a world.

That’s what ‘economics’ really means, when we look outward to the global scale.

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So, how are we doing on the management of this household? Um, er, well, uh, sort of ‘curate’s egg’, maybe? - ‘excellent in parts, m’lord?’

Ah. Oh. Right…

Ouch…

In which case, what do we do about that? What’s the plan?

Short-answer: there isn’t one.

(Not really. Not yet. Not at the fully global scale that we need.)

Which, actually, is the right answer, right now. If we had some kind of full-scope plan, in the present conditions, it would be basically meaningless - a mess of wishful-thinking, nothing more than that. There’s a lot more that needs to be in place before we get to the stage of making big fancy plans that have any chance of success.

And who the heck am I to be talking about this, anyway? I mean, I’m not some great scientist or economist or politician, am I? I’m just a grumpy old guy, sitting alone in his house, writing a newsletter from the back end of Australia. All I am is just a maker of tools for change. Y’know, tools and methods that work the same way for every scope and scale, every type of content or context, every timescale. That kind of stuff. Nothing importa…

Ah.

Wait a moment?

Actually, no, yeah, that’s something that, yeah, might actually be relevant here…

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Yeah. We don’t have a plan. Not yet. Not all the way out to the scale that we’ll need. We know that.

But we do have all the tools that we need for planning. The tools we need to plan, act, rethink and re-plan, dynamically, connecting at every scope and scale, every type of content and context, every timescale and more.

Tools to build vision and values, to identify success-criteria and all that.

Tools to prioritise tasks, and choose those tasks in the first place.

Tools to make sense in uncertainty, to guide sensemaking in action.

Tools to plan out structures and services, and get them all to work together.

Tools to guide change at every level.

Practical tools to help skills, too: the kinds of things we’ve seen here in this newsletter, such as noticing, how to use Inverse Murphy, how to use hope. How to find friends and allies in the midst of change, how to develop judgement, or how to avoid that crushing sense of feeling like a hypocrite. And ways to help us sidestep the traps of the paediarchs and the covert-crybabies, too. Practical stuff like that.

And even if we don’t have the right tool right now, there are tools to help make more tools, and then more tools, to cover everything that we might need.

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So what’s the plan, right now?

Short-answer: learn how to get good at using the tools.

Learn how to get good at planning. At re-planning, on an instant.

And be ready for any gap where the ever-controlling covert-crybabies let down their guard for even a brief moment, opening up even the briefest chance for viable change.

Small changes at first, quiet, subtle, easily missed, too small for the crybabies to see if we do it right, but building and building in the background until it can finally break us all free from their childish need for control. A chance to break free from the madness, and start again to manage that household in the proper way for the enterprise of life as a whole.

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