By now I’m sure you’re familiar with Murphy’s Law: “Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.” If you work in IT or events or even in a trade you’ve seen things go upside down on many occasions. Did you ever ask yourself why this happens? Or even what you can do to fix it? What about avoiding it completely?

I have done a lot in IT over the years. I’ve also been working hard as an event planner and coordinator with Tech Field Day. The best lessons that I’ve learned about anticipating disaster have come from my time in Scouting. I’m often asked by companies “how did you know that would happen?” I almost always answer the same way: “I didn’t know THAT would go wrong, but I knew something would. I just kept my eye out for it.” It almost sounds too simple, right? But if you are familiar with event planning you know it’s almost a law, just like Mr. Murphy’s famous version.

How can you anticipate problems and still manage to make things happen? You can’t always fix everything. However, you can make sure that people don’t notice the issues. You just have to be willing to bend a little with the new situation. Rolling with the punches, as it were. There’s no better mascot than Gumby, the beloved childhood clay toy. Borrowing “semper” to be translated as “always” as in the Marine motto of “Semper Fidelis” (always faithful) and you arrive at the unofficial motto for most scouting events. It’s something we’ve always repeated during our Scouting events as a reminder to stay flexible. I even have a little Gumby with me to serve as a reminder courtesy of my friend Rebecca Koss after a particularly fun bout of necessary flexibility when delivering a course during COVID.

Always Flexible

Things go wrong more than we’d like to admit. We’re late for an appointment. We’re missing a page out of our workbook. A butterfly flapped its wings in the Sahara and now your hard drive is blank. Whatever the reason for the troubles you still have something you need to do. It’s way too easy to just admit defeat and hope that you can make a better attempt the next time. Or, you can bend a little and try to make the most of it.

“Semper Gumby” doesn’t mean you quit. It doesn’t mean you scream and yell and cry because things aren’t fair. It means you assess the situation, apply some flexible thinking, and you make it work. Nothing is perfect, but our response to that can be pretty close. You just have to accept that the more set-in-stone something might be the more likely it is that you can do a reasonable job of it when things go wrong and still do well.

Here’s an example. You’re teaching a day-long seminar course and you’re running behind. Specifically, you’re running behind because a fire alarm went off and you wasted half an hour on something that’s outside your control. Does it suck? Yes. Does it mean that things aren’t going to be perfect? Absolutely. But will it be the end of your class? No. Because you can be flexible and claw back some of that time to make it work.

You’re probably already formulating in your head how you could get that time back. Shortening sections by five minutes is a great way to reclaim time. You can also rearrange the schedule on the fly to focus on the important lessons so people get the critical information. Not everything lends itself well to this kind of remix. If lessons are dependent on other information you can’t rearrange them. But if you can move things or even change their content you can work some magic. Group discussions can become more focused lessons. Ten minutes of note taking can be four minutes of notes being shared on a projector and copied.

Go With The Flow

What if the hassle is because someone is terminally late? If you’ve ever worked with an important vice president in a company you know they’re constantly running behind. Sometimes that’s on them. Their calendars are always super packed and their appointments always run long. It’s because their people book their appointments short to keep them moving. But that extra five minutes they want to take to finish something up makes their last appointment an hour late. Sound like the doctor’s office to you?

How can you anticipate that? Well, honestly, you can’t. If you’re flexible you can make it work. VP running ten minutes behind? Fine. Have someone else start presenting in their place. Move on to the next part. Unless that VP is holding some kind of crucial information you can probably start the meeting without them. Especially if they’re just “framing the discussion” or some other thing that shows what they’re adding is less than necessary. Plus, if you start the meeting without them they’ll mention to their people that they need to get them in early next time to avoid interrupting next time.

Flexibility doesn’t mean you don’t have rock solid deadlines. Some things have to happen at a certain time or in a certain way that can’t easily be moved. The flexibility part comes when you learn how to adjust so that things flow smoothly around them. Imagine a boulder in a river. The river can’t move the boulder. So it flows around. Soon the river either wears away the boulder or accepts that it won’t move and continues on the path. The boulder is none the wiser and the river accomplishes its goals.

Tom’s Take

The next time you find yourself stressed out because something isn’t going to plan, don’t scream at the heavens. Just breathe and think of a little green cartoon character. As it was phrased in the 1984 Dune movie, “bend like a reed in the wind” and find a way to be flexible in your approach. You might not be able to affect the kind of change you want but being open to the idea means you can find a way to make something happen that will keep your meeting or lesson on track. If you do it with enough flourish people might even believe that was the plan all along. Just be flexible.