A Project Manager’s Game Plan for Dealing with Incurable Cancer

The best laid plans…often aren’t. We’re generally pretty good about figuring out how to work situations to our best advantage.  Until they’re no longer to our advantage.  I seem to be running into a spate of these of late. 

The image associated with this post was from a dinner where our “best-laid plan” was NOT to host dinner at our house, but to volunteer to bring chili to someone else’s!  HAH!  Perfect. We didn’t have to worry about post-dinner clean-up, and any leftovers would ultimately be ours. Unless, of course, the leftover chili makes it out of the back seat of the car and becomes an integral part of the interior of the garage.  That was NOT part of the plan.

Want to get into serious policy matters? The current administration has been blowing its own horn about the lowered cost of prescription insulin.  $35/month – Max.  Great, said Carl the diabetic! Until, of course, the unintended consequences kicked in.  That’s $35/month for each different type of insulin in a month and doesn’t take into account the needles.  This week was the most annoying unintended consequence of all. Two manufacturers have now found themselves unable to produce the product they’ve produced for years (at $35/month), and you simply won’t be able to get their insulin until (at the earliest) 2025.   The goal of the plan? Reduce the price to the end-user.  The result? Force the end-user through a series of hoops to change their treatment strategy and hope that the new current provider doesn’t come to a similar cost realization.

In our lives, we make choices and decisions all the time. We believe we’re acting in our best interests. But we need to temper those interests with just a dash of clairvoyance. When we’re changing our approach to anything, from recipes to treatments to client meetings, we need to take serious pause and ask not how this will change our life today, but how it will change our life in a matter of weeks or months or years.

Where does this apply?

  • Making any major purchase (Don’t think a new refrigerator won’t come with new challenges)
  • Moving (Apartments aren’t the cure-all for home repairs and homes aren’t the panacea for annoying landlord experiences)
  • Altering your relationship status
  • Changing careers
  • Telling someone good news
  • Telling someone bad news

Frankly, if it involves change, it has the potential for unintended consequences.  That shouldn’t stop you from forging ahead on a change, but it should be enough to make you ask about the big-picture implications of your actions.

Determining the Degree of Vulnerability

The first and simplest step is to examine the range of possible outcomes (different states of nature) that may result from the change.  Do your assessment for a one-month, one-year and half-decade window.  And be honest about it. When it came to insulin, someone had to know that setting a fixed price for the treatment would have longer-term implications. (Oh, and for the chili on my garage floor?  It’s been almost a year, and every now and then you can still pick up a whiff of cumin).

Once you know your exposure, figure out how to make a soft landing if the worst case happens.  I planned to change careers back in 1981. I was no longer going to be a radio news director.  I was about to become an Air Traffic Control Specialist (ATCS).  Working with the FAA, I wouldn’t have any of the grief that I had in radio!  Steady, high-paying work. Clear career path. No monthly or quarterly audience assessments. Retire before you’re 60. SWEET!

I dove in feet first, without a soft landing plan. I dove in without considering what the FAA could do to me. When they told me I had the job, I simply believed them, blew off my old career, and moved all of my belongings into storage back in Ohio. Genius.

Take a moment and do the one-month “what-could-go-wrong” evaluation.

It did go wrong.

The day I was to fly out to Oklahoma City for training, I received the only telegram I’ve ever gotten in my life. Do not report to the Academy for training.  You have been medically disqualified for deficient visual acuity.  My eyes were too bad. QUICK!  Time for a soft landing!

I could have planned out alternative radio stations as a fallback.  I could have looked into the appeals process (it didn’t help). I could have determined next steps career-wise. None of the above. I was 15 hours from my old job, where I had left telling my boss what I really thought of him (bad idea).  A soft landing might have been possible if I had already found alternative job sites, careers or alliances.  I had done none of the homework to deal with unintended consequences.  (The good news is that I found a small-town radio station that would take me with only a demo tape to my name, met my wife, moved up the media ladder, and wound up living the dream…and it only took the better part of a decade).

What would I suggest you do?  Start small. When you’re making the simple decision to change your (insert almost anything here), ask the two big questions—How could this go insanely right? And How could this go insanely wrong? You will land somewhere in-between.  Whether you’re making the decision on changing careers or changing dentists, the process remains largely the same.  And if you’re analysis drags you into a universe where you couldn’t possibly survive the outcome, either plot out the soft landing or forget the change.

Small things first. Then the big things. 26 years ago, my wife and I decided it was time to work for ourselves instead of anyone else. We carefully weighed the pros and cons. We flagged the opportunities for soft landings. We determined how to improve the probability of positive outcomes.

And if the worst outcome you’ve had in the past year or two is spilled chili in the garage, you’ve arrived!

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Carl Pritchard, PMP, PMI-RMP is grateful he didn’t face any unintended consequences this morning.   He welcomes your e-mails with questions or comments at carl@carlpritchard.com Want more?  Go to Amazon and order Carl’s book: The Stage Four Project