Planning for Everything

Talk

We can’t predict the future, yet we do it all the time. We organize events, trips, projects, days, weeks, and years. We plan to buy a home, build a career, survive cancer, learn to dance, teach a class, or get in shape. Our ability to model the world as it is and might be is a gift, but mental time travel is also really hard. Fortunately, since planning is a skill, everyone from playful improviser to rigorous planner can improve, and that’s the aim of this talk. Along the way, we’ll cover: The principles and practices of nonlinear planning. How to grow and sustain hope with willpower and waypower. When to pivot or persist with paths, goals, values, and metrics. How artificial intelligence is poised to transform what we plan. The relationship between planning and information architecture. If you hate planning, you’re doing it wrong. The uncertainty of change makes us crave chaos or control, but it’s as dangerous to be rigid as it is to move fast and break things. To organize the future, we will find better ways, because happiness is a prediction, and it’s also the freedom you feel upon realizing there is no one right way to plan.