I often find my professional tendencies are reflected in my hobbies. One of these is scuba diving. Ever since those training dives in Balikpapan, one of the core principles that was drilled into me was “plan your dive, dive your plan.” This saying has stuck with me to over 100 dives, and I credit it for helping me through situations on bottom and staying calm.
Why is planning and holding to plan important? Diving is so fun and relaxing that it’s easy to have time slip by; suddenly you’re over 30m underwater with 25 bar on your pressure gauge, far from the boat and you don’t see your dive buddy in low visibility water. Big trouble and puts your life, and possibly others, at risk!
The planning is relatively straightforward – know the starting air pressure and expected consumption rate, what are the depths and paths to take, what air pressures to start surfacing safely at, and communicating this before diving with my dive buddy and boat crew. I don’t deviate from the plan no matter how much I think I can get away with it “just this one time” staying down longer or skipping decompression stops. Emergencies can happen but common ones are identified with contingency actions and can be safely resolved by sticking to the plan. And this works great for de-escalating conflicts with other divers, by establishing criteria and agreeing to hold to it.
There is Mike Tyson’s saying “everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face” that counters what I’ve said, but I find the root cause for plans to fail is not anticipating unknown factors correctly. It’s often less the “why” something happened but “what” the outcome is: it doesn’t matter if a shark bites my regulator hose or it starts leaking at a fitting, my planned actions will be the same towards safety. We should also learn from those incidents and incorporate them back into our planning process.
I find I bring this same approach to my work. I enjoy being able to map out and piece together the activity streams that need to occur and when, who is responsible, and identifying open switches that need special actions. Engineering work develops the working envelope that that satisfies safety design limits and ensures a robust design, and once operations start I follow prepared actions to get to the end safely and meet the goals, with clear contingencies based on actual results. Having a well-developed plan on hand is a great feeling, and seeing it executed is amazing.
This isn’t to say that I’m inflexible with my plans; if a last-minute change needs to happen (Let’s go inside this shipwreck! or We need to change rig sequence!) then the change and consequences need to be fully understood. In business we have the flexibility to communicate and resolve before committing and documenting the change. Too often someone has their own priority that conflicts with another’s plan and allowing that priority to proceed without a full accounting can cause significant issues, and verifying the impact of taking up that priority is critical.
Do you find yourself often in scenarios where the tasks start deviating from plans? Do you hold so rigid to plans that opportunities are missed and not followed up the next time?
Leave a Reply