TBD 48: Try my recipe for disaster!
Make a plan for utter failure.
At a team offsite recently, I ran an exercise called “Recipe for Disaster.”
I wanted to share it today because it’s a powerful, fun way to unearth those little ways we're unconsciously working against our best interests. Here's the recipe in four easy steps:
1. List your biggest fears about your future.
These fears can be large or small. They can impact you alone or your team or even your company. Choose one pain point from your list that’s a timely concern and write down the steps to take to ensure that that horrible future would come to pass. What will you need to do to ensure that you’ll…
💯 Have a horrible summer?
💯 Make sure your relationship disintegrates?
💯 Make sure your team fails and never meets your goals?
💯 Make sure you're stuck at your level in your role with zero advancement….forever!!?
2. That's right. Make a plan to fail hard.
So, if your biggest fear is finding a new job that is a complete mismatch and totally unsatisfying, you might want to make sure you:
✅ Don't prepare any questions for the interviewer
✅ Never meet your actual hiring manager
✅ Compromise on salary and take what’s offered
✅ Make hurried decisions to get a new role as quickly as possible
✅ Immediately start your new job with no time in between old/new roles
✅ Make plenty of vague, unsupported assumptions about the new role
✅ Interview only with companies you don’t respect or find interesting
So, after making your list of all the ways you can 100% guarantee that you’ll construct your biggest fear and fail miserably, the real work starts.
3. Review your list of steps and circle the things you’re currently doing on your list.
🚫 "Gosh, I’m not prepared with questions that matter to me."
🚫 "My interview with the hiring manager was short and I haven’t asked for more time."
🚫 "I am pursuing all roles because I haven’t thought about what would be important to me."
🚫 "I’m burned out but feeling pressured to start my new role immediately."
4. Stop doing those things! Work out a new plan forward that eliminates counterproductive actions.
Recipe for Disaster is delicious because:
It puts fears and concerns on center stage instead of having them lurk in the background.
It's fun to imagine how messed up it would be to work hard to produce terrible outcomes.
Finally, you see where you’re actually (and probably unintentionally) working against your greatest potential.