When a Plan Comes Together

Plans
rarely go
as planned.

In fact,
they often fall
apart.

Perhaps this
is why Hannibal often said
“I love it,
when a plan
comes
together.”

As if to denote
that a plan
has to fall apart
first
before it can come together
to create
a new plan
that actually goes
as planned.

p.s: Much gratitude goes out to Pinky Parsons for inspiring this post.

Manipulation and Creation

Manipulation
involves the desire
to move someone
or something
to a place or state
the manipulator expects.

This is not to judge manipulation
as good/bad or right/wrong.

Through mutual agreement
& rationalization,
one can differentiate between
transparent
vs. surreptitious,
well-intended
vs. ill-intended,
manipulation.

A magic show
can be thought of as
transparent manipulation.
Feeding kids hidden vegetables
can be thought of
as well-intended manipulation.

But manipulation stands
in some sense,
opposite of creation,
because creation
involves the desire
to let emerge
a place or product
the creator did not expect.

Innovate First, then Problem Solve

Innovation does not solve problems.
It only has the potential to do so.

Say I produced an innovative vacuum cleaner,
If the problem is a dirty house,
unless someone uses the innovation repeatedly,
problem persists.

Innovation creates unexpected choices we didn’t perceive to have,
Problem solving uses existing choices to achieve an expected result.

Problem solving gets stuck
when we lack the requisite variety of choices
to achieve our expected result.

Thus,
when we’re stuck,
we need to temporarily put aside problem solving
in favor of innovation
to first increase the variety of our choices.

Sometimes innovation even helps us realize
that what we considered a problem is not,
and the problem vanishes