“Life is what happens to us while we are making other plan.” These wise words were first spoken by the author Allen Saunders, and later popularized by John Lennon, and I can’t think of a more practical piece of advice in life or business. Planning is an indispensable part of achieving one’s goals, but rarely does anything unfold exactly as intended. Accepting this as a possibility, if not a certainty, can dramatically increase your chances for success. Setting out assuming that either your destination or your path will change from your intention can prepare you to overcome far more potential obstacles along the way.
I consider adaptability to be critical to the success of any project, and I often joke that “my contingencies contingencies have contingencies”. This has been a consistently valuable approach throughout my career, regardless of industry or role. I’ve had to adapt to kickoff meetings learning that what the client was sold was not the same as what was scoped to deliver, and I’ve pivoted company services to meet market demand that was far from the planned offering. The reason this topic is top of mind at the moment though is more personal. A year ago, I embarked on the biggest move of my life to-date. I packed up my little world and shipped it almost 3,000 miles from San Francisco to New York.
The plan was fairly typical of such a move: I followed a great opportunity for personal and professional growth. Six months later I faced a very different reality: looking for work, three time zones away from a network I had cultivated for fifteen years, completely isolated from anything familiar in one of the most competitive cities on the planet. Finding myself in that position was overwhelming, but I also recognized it as an opportunity to grow in new ways. There would be no place for innovation if not for adversity.
When you’re faced with the need to rebuild, an often overlooked advantage is you can choose exactly what you want to be. As with any plan, why not be ambitious and work towards that goal, while adjusting your approach as conditions evolve? Settling for good enough rarely achieves even that goal. So, as I found myself reconstructing a “new” new life after a false start, I have a fresh perspective and approach to my career objectives. Launching Design Means Business was a big part of that and it’s helped me in two enormous ways. First, it’s helped showcase my point of view and experience in a more digestible way for potential clients, and second, it’s a foundation to cultivate a personal brand and goodwill that will transcend my work environments along the arc of my career. Did I expect to take this path? No. Is it good for my well-being in the long run? Absolutely. In life, as in business, it’s important to first understand what problems you’re solving to make decisions to your greatest advantage.
In 1994 Amazon.com was incorporated with the plan of selling books online. In those early days of the internet, much of the technology required for this type of sophisticated online retail business didn’t exist. The reality faced by Amazon led to the creation of Amazon Web Services, which became a formal service offering of Amazon in 2002. Today AWS is Amazon’s largest source of revenue; in FY 2018 AWS generated a profit of $7.3B. Imagine the opportunity cost if Amazon had decided to ”stick to the plan” and didn’t realize the opportunity they had to commercialize the solutions they had created to accomplish their primary goals.
As I mentioned before, understanding the problem first before devising the solution is critical to this kind of success. This is an important characteristic of highly effective design teams as well. Design teams and organizations that view design as a means of systematically determining what should exist and why continue to produce these types of innovations. The companies who are defining our future, and setting the bar for every other company out there are using these approaches. The companies they are overtaking, the monoliths of the past, are typically those who treat design like the “polish applied at the end”, if they give it any consideration at all. In my last post, Peacock Camouflage, I talked about the design value index as a subset of the S&P 500 that identifies companies who are leading examples of those who leverage design strategically. It’s worth noting that Amazon is not only on this list, but they also aspire to be the most human centric company on the planet. As they venture further into non-literary pursuits like drone delivery, groceries, and voice assistant, it’s easy to recognize that their direction is defined by the problems they are solving as they continue to evolve, rather than the plan they assumed to follow from the outset.
From where I sit now, looking back on the events of the past year, and looking forward to the potential of my future, the success of companies like Amazon reminds me that I’m on the right path. I’m grateful to be in the business of helping my clients make better decisions by understanding human needs. I’m just as confident that this approach will take me on to bigger and better things, and help fulfill my intention to bring meaningful change to other people’s lives as well. Looking forward from here I have a direction and a plan, but as always, I fully expect (and frankly hope) that my actual path will lead me somewhere unexpected and exciting. It feels appropriate to conclude this post with another quote that honors my sentiments, as well as my adoptive home of NYC. “It ain’t where I been, but where I’m bout to go” -Pharrell and Jay-Z.