Everything is iterative, although sometimes the connections are tenuous.

nothing is linear, we leap across chasms, we go sideways backwards and forwards

we think of our future in little iterative steps; we live life in big strides of change

Our plans for the future should just be open to the possibilities which we will encounter.

I wrote this in December 2011 and stored it in a draft email that is still sitting in my email where I chanced upon it just now. It’s another case of Synchronicity because just yesterday I watched a TED talk in which Kathryn Schulz, when talking about how we approach our future used the line “and something else happened instead”. I was instantly envious of what what she had created as her small phrase encapsulates perfectly this issue that has exercised my mind, and my coaching, for so long. In fact in August 2013 I took the above thoughts and put them into a blog titled “the future is not a straight line”. Bumping into my old email and Kathryn’s phrase warrant giving it another run.

Over that same time frame I’ve engaged with Otto Scharmer’s (shared with Joseph Jaworski; he of Synchronicity) Theory U. He uses a phrase which is the title of one of his books “Leading from the emerging future”. The message here is the same. We don’t know the circumstances in which we will live out the time that is ahead. The message in this title though points to one methodology for dealing with this unknown. I mention this because it’s important not to take what I say as a recommendation to have no sense of how we will engage our future. Instead it’s a caution not to have a plan that is at odds with the way life plays out.

If there’s one thing to plan for, it’s to be ready for change.