Planning & Improvising Part II: Chaos

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I believe in the principle of chaos, not in an anarchical sense, but rather chaos as a principle that the vast majority of elements are beyond our control. I’ve been learning a lot over the past few years about how little I control, and how trying to control things really can strangle the free roaming spaces of a life full of grace and love.

A few years ago prior to a triathlon I was competing in, I had the privilege of hearing Dave Scott, a World Champion Ironman triathlete, a hall of famer, and a legend in his own right, speak to the athletes prior to the race. As a bit of background about Dave Scott, he has won Ironman Hawaii 6 times, and was involved in some of the most ground breaking and exciting races in the history of the sport of triathlon. He is certainly no slouch and he to this day is held with great admiration in the Ultra-endurance community as a pioneer at going fast over long distances.

Dave said something incredibly profound, not just for racing triathlons, but for life. To Paraphrase, Dave said the following:

“It’s a hard course out there, don’t let the big challenge distract you. Take each tough moment in stride, and overcome the little challenges that present themselves, one at a time. On race day, you can only worry about what you control…weather, wind, technical malfunction are all out of your hands. Focus on your pace, focus on your nutrition, and enjoy the ride.”

If you agree with my principle of chaos, and Dave’s principle on tactically executing on “Race Day” (life), I think there are some major implications on how life looks thriving in chaos. When we learn to adapt, move in tandem with that which is beyond our sphere of immediate control we become great improvisers and we learn to move in flow, step for step with the things in life that don’t go according to plan (or at least according to our plans). What can we really control?...many people would say life is 20% what happens to you, and 80% how you respond to what happens. In reality, we can only really control our response, the choices (Dieting Choices), we make. Often what happens to us doesn’t align neatly with our plans, and in those moments we have the ability to make decisions on how we respond.

Last week I commented on a few things regarding plans, but that discussion was primarily a setup for communicating a proper balance between plans & a willingness to change the plan. As I stated, there is great danger in being so preoccupied in both the plan and the goal of the plan that we miss out on enjoying the ride (Planning & Improvising Part I). I’ve fallen victim to this trap many times, but I’ve learned from it, and found that when we live by our own agendas we miss a great deal of joy, and some amazing adventures.

Improvising, is creating room for chaos into the equation of our plans, the result is a balance between our future and present tense, leaving us adequately focused yet appropriately detached from our personally defined objectives. Improvising takes those elements that are beyond our control, welcomes them, and responds to them open heartedly.

When you look at the life of Jesus, he took lots of pit stops and detours, he moved in flow to the circumstances that were around him. He allowed room to deviate from his plans, he had an intimate connection with immediate circumstances as they arrived, and acknowledged their potential to have eternal significance. If you have ever had the experience of having someone who is preoccupied in some activity drop what they are busy with to give you or someone attention, those moments stand out. Whether that be a parent putting down the newspaper to play with their kids, a pedestrian stopping to aid the homeless, a motorist pulling over to help out a fellow traveler…this is improvising, and these are important detours. Improvising in this regard is the act of taking our plans, and making them a lesser priority to immediate circumstance, things beyond our control, the beautiful chaos that is a life filled and lead by God’s spirit.

When we improvise we let go of the time, goals, and objectives we so inappropriately define as our own. To improvise is to embrace that maybe, just maybe, God has other things in mind for our days, weeks, months, and years. Chaos as we see it, is calculated and carefully planned by a master architect and is an important way that he intercedes into the daily workings of our lives. How often do we feel that the circumstances of this world are so wildly out of control that they break any hopes that we may be able to “control” what’s happening around us? Its these moments that tend to loosen our grip on the agenda, and tighten our grip to God…sometimes, we’re just hanging on for dear life

Chaos from a human perspective (chaos without God), is the absence of order. Chaos with God, is coming to grips with the fact that God defines “order”, not us. Control is a false belief, it is a system of comfort that we have made to convince ourselves that life without God is not only plausible but that we on our own are in fact capable of handling things on our own, independent of Him. Improvising is welcoming God at all costs, at all times, it is welcoming chaos to our “plans”, and making room for his Plan.

So where is the balance? We of course mustn’t sit idly by pursuing and living lives lacking direction or activity. Conversely we also should not be so preoccupied with doing things and going places, that we become possessive of our own “plans”. Balance is the willingness to set our direction aside, to accept the pit stops and detours as they are introduced to our lives, it is to adjust our trajectory to match Christ’s. This is life in tune to the Spirit. It is fluid, it changes, it takes having our eyes on God, our hearts open to his people and his work, and a proper posture, subordinated, to the hand of the almighty.

In the end, we open the door to chaos, but we do so trusting that the chaos we see is carefully crafted in by the parameters of God’s goodness and sovereignty. Ultimately we find ourselves trying less to understand what God is doing and trying to fit his plans to ours, and rather we end up fitting our plans to his, trusting that whatever chaos may come, that it’s a part of an infinitely complex, perfect, and beautiful plan.

One of my favorite quotes from C.S. Lewis’s “The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe” is when Mr. Tumnus and Lucy are watching Aslan (the symbolic lion figure of God) walk away, Mr. Tumnus States clearly “He is not a tame a tame lion.”…Lucy’s response, “No…but he is good”

God cannot be tamed to our plans, he is wild, and reckless in the lengths he goes through to make himself known to this broken humanity. His wildness can mean a bit of chaos for us, but with that wildness comes a taste of his vast and unsearchable goodness. In those moments of deep uncertainty, total chaos, we are given the opportunity to connect with and trust a wildly loving God, and we are given a choice…do we adhere to our silly and eternally devoid plans? or will we put our plans aside, embrace chaos, taste the sweet flavors of a loving god, and see the wild passion of a loving savior?

Embracing the Chaos,

CP

Planning & Improvising Part I: Restructuring

For the next two weeks I am going to be posting two delicately related topics, Planning and Improvising.

I acknowledge that some of this entry in particular could be misconstrued to be focused on “success”, but I would encourage you to think critically about what success means, and to critically asses the deeper goals that define true achievement…

Game Plans

There is no doubt that there is a high correlation between a well thought out plan and the likelihood of meeting goals. Plans are the things that map a pathway of executable steps towards an end goal. If Goals and Objectives are the end, than plans and processes should articulate the means to achieve the “end”.

From training plans to business plans, planning can be a valuable process to help bridge the gap between where we want to go, and where we are today. Like a game of chess, plans get us calculating a series of interrelated moves that will strategically put the odds of self defined success in our favor. The process of planning asks two fundamental questions, “Where do I want to go?” and “How will I get there?” However, there are a few cautions in planning that make a life lived strictly by a stated “plan” dangerous, or at least introduce an element of personal risk to the equation. Two main areas of risk are:

1. Misidentification of Goals
2. Over preoccupation with processes

Misidentification of Goals

Plans can be a huge element that aids forward progress and acheivement of goals, but plans themselves are only effective to the extent that we start with the right answer to the “Where do I Want to go?” question. If we incorrectly diagnose for ourselves where we’re trying to go, or the right “destination”, we may execute a plan perfectly, but we’ll end up in the wrong place.

Lets assume that a business has a goal to grow to the size of 1,000 employees and $10 million in revenue, Today, the business has 20 employees and is earning, $4 million in revenue. What happens when it turns out that 1,000 employees and $10 million of sales results in a situation where the company no longer has a viable business model and is losing money in their bottom line. The business can execute a plan to achieve their goal, but as it may turn out, it’s the wrong goal.

As a second example, lets say a student is assigned a project in school to do a report on one of the 50 states in the US. In order to get awarded an A on the project the student needs to gather, 5 photographs unique to whatever state is selected, that’s it. If our example student decides that a 40 page paper outlining the history and uniqueness of his state would be much better that 5 simple pictures, executes a plan, and finishes a 40 page written project as opposed to the assigned 5 photograph project, what is the end result? Failure! Even if we have perfectly executed plans, when we improperly select goals, we fail.

When we set the wrong goals, we make the wrong plans.

Preoccupation with Process

The second risk, has to do with losing vision for the correct goals for the sake of the plans which were written to get us there. Simply put, when we place too much value on the plans themselves and fail to focus on what the plans were drawn up to achieve, we risk missing accomplishment of the end goal. Sometimes it’s hard to identify when plans need to change or when plans actually detract from progress towards our objectives. If we become obsessed with the road map, we risk failing to identify that we’re actually driving down the wrong road.

In a spiritual sense, this risk manifests as being religious while being detached from God. When we become too preoccupied with law and process, we miss the nature of God, and what he’s really trying accomplish. We become Pharisees, legalistic, and in all reality rigid and robotic in all things pertaining to God. We do not love and enjoy Him, we simply behave.

This process preoccupation risk, is prevalent in a variety of venues, business planning, personal plans, training plans, financial planning…sometimes plans need to change and when we loose focus of the goals, we reduce our lives to systematic pursuit of task while never really making any progress. If we set the right goals and we stay focused on the end game, we need to put ourselves in a position to realize that things don’t always play out like we envision, and that change is a necessary part of goal achievement.

If our founding fathers thought it necessary to have a process to ratify and change the laws (or plan) that governed this Democratic Republic, in hopes that if in the event that the plan to preserve freedom needed to change, it could. Shouldn’t we afford ourselves the same ability?

If we become too preoccupied with the plans themselves, they mutate into the primary focus, while all the long, the truly important thing (the goal) goes unattended.

It is entirely possible to succeed at a plan, and fail at the goal. Just as it is entirely possible to be “good” or “religious”, and miss God.

Restructuring

For most of my professional career, I’ve worked in the field of restructuring. I have dealt with and aided businesses that have gotten to a point where the plan needs to be rewritten to survive. Needless to say, I have learned much about what happens when plans need to change…and also what happens when plans need to change and they don’t. I was talking with my Dad a few months back about business, and he properly reminded me that, “The best businesses are always restructuring.” I believe that restructuring has some big time significance for other areas of life beyond corporate organization policies…restructuring by definition is the rebuilding or re-engineering of our plans.

Restructuring is what happens when plans change; it is the adjustment of either plans or objectives and sometimes both. Sometimes in life, we get to a point when we realize that there is a disconnect between where we want to go, and how we’re going about getting there, which leads us to change. If insanity is defined as doing the same action while expecting a different result, the restructuring is what we do when we want to get sane…its when we change what we do.

I believe that there are a few checks and balances we can build into our lives that help us identify when we need change; accountability and community being the primary mechanisms for identifying when and how we need to rethink our “plans”. Third party input provides guidance that we cannot easily arrive at on our own. When we have others who can objectively and critically look at our plans and our goals, we afford ourselves a perspective that is detached from our own psychological garbage. We all too easily get wrapped up in what we’re doing and where we’re going, that without good advisors, we risk careening through life with our heads down, blind to dangers ahead. There is a reason that top level athletes have coaches, there is a reason that the biggest and best run businesses employ third party advisors, there is a reason that many addicts require intervention to deal with their problems…there are certain risks and problems that not only are more easily identified from the outside, but some problems legitimately NEED to be diagnosed externally. Relationships afford us a level of sanity that helps us stay on the right track; much good comes when we get perspective that is completely detached for the delirium we are susceptible to when left to our own way.

I guess in reality the important things here are not goals or plans, but rather having the relational infrastructure in our lives the affords us the ability to assess both a need and a means to change. God’s grace, is a means of letting us constantly get restructured, it gives us a chance to change. While God has the benefit of making and crafting perfect plans, we do not. Restructuring is what happens when we identify a deviation in our plans from God’s plans, and we initiate change to realign ourselves with God.

To augment what my Dad said, “The best people are always restructuring or getting restructured”. This is not an obsession with self improvement, but rather it is a constant realigning or ourselves with God, it is accepting the need to be restructured, the need for constant change and re-creation. Just as with anything, it’s a long process…but over time we find ourselves not simply dealing with moments that require change, but embracing it.


Embracing Change,
CP

Next week, I will write on improvising, or creating balance between the plans and change.

Being Average - Incentives

Our society is full of incentive structures. Being incentivized means that there is some thing, either a reward or punishment, that will influence or help guide our behavior. Some incentives exist to get us to do the right thing, while others exist to prevent us from doing wrong or destructive things. Speeding tickets exist to keep us from speeding; year end bonuses exist to keep us working hard. Economists and psychologists alike have commented at length about the effectiveness of incentive structure in society as a means to change, motivate, and influence behavior. But I can’t help but wonder, are we fooling ourselves?

There is one thing that I feel doesn’t coexist well with social incentive structure, and that is excellence. So many of our society’s incentives, both locally and globally, personally and professionally, are structured around being average and our relative performance to our peers. Excellence is seldom properly rewarded, and therefore seldom pursued.

The marginal effort required to be excellent is high. Often, the cost associated with excellence over the long run either is or becomes so costly that when we live by social incentive, we ultimately arrive at a destination where we become disengaged and distracted from the very things that the incentive systems were intended to drive us towards. Incentives are established to drive us to outperform the next best competitor, they develop a system which redefines excellence as being relative, when in fact excellence is absolute.

Excellence for my purposes and for this discussion is defined as the absolute top level of input in any situation. Giving 100%, putting the best forward, working with your whole mind, body, strength, and spirit, REGARDLESS OF YOUR PEERS.

Here are two examples.

Speeding tickets are a negative incentive to prevent breaking the law, specifically driving above the speed limit. Are they effective? Well, it depends. Is the cost of a speeding ticket high enough that it will keep people from speeding, or are there certain demographics socio-economically that might view the cost of a speeding ticket well worth the benefit of being able to drive above the speed limit? Are there certain situations which would completely negate the incentive system itself? Examples: a wife in labor, late to a job interview, etc. Furthermore, if the ultimate goal (or excellence) is to prevent or eradicate speeding, does the incentive system work? Do we all take up arms to prevent speeding? NO! Rather we revert to the mean, and simply take measures to create balance between risk, reward, incentives, and hence become average…and in reality still speeding in situations where we can find a rationalization for our behavior that outweighs the cost of any potential tickets.

Now lets think about a Super Bowl Championship, a Gold Medal, or any other milestone of Athletic accomplishment. Here the incentive is a positive one, namely some financial reward or social prowess that motivates an individual to make personal sacrifices that are necessary to achieve certain stated objectives, a championship! Does this incentive system provoke excellence? Not necessarily, this system promotes that any individual would do only enough to outperform their next best competitor. Even if temporarily the desire to win some championship title motivates a person to the point of achieving a truly dominant level where no one can even come close to challenging their level of performance (Lance Armstrong, Tiger Woods, Michael Phelps), over time, achievement becomes empty. Ultimately, the cost of being the best becomes too high or infeasible enough that outperformance not excellence is reinforced. With each passing championship, or achievement, any participant simply finds a new goal or benchmark to pursue, and is left with empty accomplishment and a incentive system to reinforce a life devoid of any true substance other than trophies and headlines.

When we succumb to living by incentives we become average, we abandon the definition of our true God-given potential, and we reduce ourselves to the lowest common denominator. As opposed to living lives based on principle and virtue we instead become products of a society and a system known as a meritocracy, where promotion, value, and advancement are awarded to those who outperform…not excellence.

So why be excellent if there does not exist some system that promotes, maintains, and nurtures excellent behavior? There has to be some other motivating factor that drives us to perform at a level that breaks free from our worldly incentive structures. There must be something that drives us not just to go the extra mile, but to go however far we can in an absolute sense…there has to be something that transcends our tendency to measure achievement, and give our absolute best.

Only one thing has the power to lead us to step out of the patterns and infrastructure created by our own notions of “success”, and that factor is a life changed by love. From a theological sense, we are called to give our everything in every way to Christ. It is a sacrifice not motivated by self deprivation, but rather an offering to honor and memorialize a life changed by the work of a loving God. The excellence as defined by Christ is a life lived completely for him. It is not about what we achieve, its about giving all we can, whenever we can, to bring glory to his name. It is as if to say, “Because I am loved in such a way, nothing less than my everything will do. Because I love God, all of my life in every way will be a reflection of that love.” Love motivates beyond incentive, it drives us to disregard the cost of excellent lives and pursue them fully.

Christ-defined excellence creates universal impact. It changes marriages, churches, relationships, workplaces, college campuses, and every nook and cranny of our lives. Pursuit of Christ-defined excellence invades our world in all that we do, and while we will inevitably fall short and come up lacking, excellence is defined not by a perfect record but how we handle respond when faced with our imperfection. Do we revert back to a life of being average and being motivated by incentive? Or do we absolutely and completely yearn to be stripped down in our non-excellent moments, accept grace, and become more excellent through the love of Christ that drives us forward?

I believe that a person who lives by the concept of excellence at all costs, and disregards the marginal concept of simply being more excellent than the rest, invokes change, and inspires excellence in others. While at its best moment this system is intangible and immeasurable by any external benchmark, lives lived in absolute excellence are markedly different and have distinction regardless of achievement. They trigger thoughtful response and dedicated attention to a life marked by something different, some factor that motivates beyond a system of rewards. While many can not define it, they can still see it.

Excellence is risky, and it often means that we must step outside of the boundaries we see and know in the world around us. But in the same breath that excellence redefines “success”, it also redefines “failure”, and when we accept that we are held to a different standard, and that the risk of failing to achieve in an earthly sense is far smaller the risk of failing to live excellently in an eternal sense.

To quote Bill and Ted’s Excellent adventure, “Be Excellent to each other!”

CP

Celebrating - First Steps

This past weekend I had the privilege of going on a fun weekend adventure with a close friend of mine down to Austin, TX. We had no agenda, no plans, no expectations…our only and primary objective was to go have a fun relaxing weekend. On Sunday evening we ended up participating in a 10k race that Nike was putting on in 25 cities around the world, the whole concept was centered around getting people together around an event to do some good for the world and a few charities through running.

I want to be honest, I’ve done plenty of races. It is easy for me to be very mechanical about racing, sometimes it feels like showing up for work; I show up, get the job done, work hard, go home. I enjoy it for certain, but often I enjoy a race well run (results) more than I enjoy simply racing. As I stood near the start line, and listened to the national anthem I felt for the first time in a long time, deeply in touch with many of the reasons that draw me back to toe the start line in my life. I realized it had been a while since I’ve felt this certain kind of excitement. I, for certain, had nothing to prove, I had no agenda, no goals, I wasn’t trying to accomplish anything specific, I was just there to enjoy the event…to soak it in completely.

As I stood there I started to recall many of the times where I had been in that position before, waiting for the race to start (figuratively and literally). There is a particular buzz that infests the air before the first steps of a race. Its hard to explain unless you’ve felt it, but I believe there are some deeply symbolic things about the first steps we take on any course in life, running and otherwise. There is an embracing of the unknown, an anticipation and a healthy fear of what lies ahead, and of course a decisive forward motion that pushes us onward despite what may come.

From Marathons to marriages, first steps are always big ones; they carry big weight and can set the tone for much of what is ahead. It is important to note that it is not the race that matters here…it’s the active step of getting out there, of doing and of trying regardless of circumstance or outcome. First steps always carry a degree of uncertainty mixed with action.

Part of what struck me about the spirit of Sunday’s race is it was, for me at least, a celebration. It wasn’t about how fast or how far, it wasn’t about an achievement, it was about enjoyment…it was about taking those first steps each day in my life and getting out on the race course and running a good race, it was about celebrating the journey and not worrying about the destination. What would my life look like if I was engaged in the act of celebrating regardless of my circumstances?

Celebrating is a hard verb for me, it’s a hard action. I like to achieve, I like to succeed, but celebrating…its so…well…soft. There is no orientation for outcome, there is no consideration for success, but rather a life marked by celebration unanimously sets circumstance aside and forces us to embrace the present tense of where we are. Celebrating means that we take the good with the bad, and we have a heart of gratitude for it all. We may not conditionally and selectively take things as good or bad, for if we truly believe we serve a sovereign and good God, then we embrace that he either allowed or mandated all of our circumstances to be so. When we celebrate, we take all that God puts in our lives and we take it with grateful hearts. Personal loss, joblessness, professional success, good grades, good looks, bad luck, disability, marriage, being single…its all his, and if we are completely his, we are called to celebrate what he is doing. We celebrate the opportunity for God to do great things in, on, through and around us…and we take those big first steps to get in on the action, and we take them daily. Its as if to say, “I don’t know where I’m going for certain, but I’m for certain that I’m going and God can take care of the rest.”

My Dad says it best, “you can’t steer a parked car”. If we are not in motion and in action, how is it possible for our ultimate trajectory to be changed?

I think if we look around, we can find so much to celebrate, but it is important that our celebrating keeps us taking action, taking first steps every day to run hard and leave it all on the course and let God do what he may. Celebration defuses the spirit of criticism and entitlement that so easily consumes us all, when we celebrate we look past all that could otherwise distract us from persevering and enjoying this great race. Celebration means we accept what we are graciously given with hearts of thanksgiving…celebration is enjoying the ride no matter how bumpy it may be.

All circumstance, good, bad and otherwise are the strokes of a master painter. Carefully planned, thoughtfully executed, beautifully intricate…our lives are a part of his masterpiece. Each brush stroke of heartache, joy, loss, and love, and each experience, each day, and each moment are all a part of his mural. They all add vibrant color and distinct character to each part of this work of art that he is carefully drawing out. All too often I find my self getting caught up in the paint and missing the painter completely. Instead of admiring the artist, I fixate on smudges instead of the broader work of art…I miss God completely.

When we live lives of celebration, we take a step back, and we admire the artist, we trust his work, and we acknowledge ourselves as a smaller part of his much larger masterpiece. We daily toe the start line, and race, we run hard, we run in faith, and we dive in to each circumstance whatever it may be. In the end, we turn back and give praise for each sanctifying brushstroke that crafts the mosaic of our lives together. In the end,

Take some time to celebrate your world, the more we look the more we find.

Stepping,
CP

PS. The picture above is of my first steps on Sunday…unfortunately Lance Armstrong and Matthew McConaughey got in the frame with me…I'm in the frame, consider it like a game of "Where's Waldo".