Always Do This When You Plan Anything
“Before anything else, preparation is the key to success” — Alexander Graham Bell (Co-founded the America Telephone)
In this story, I would like to share a notion that I get to learn when I’m in college. It all began when I got appointed to become the project officer for Weekend, a get-together event for Catholic freshmen. When I was preparing for the event, I’m also being supervised by the President of the Catholic Students Family (Keluarga Mahasiswa Katolik). I often meet up with her, mostly to discuss the proposal cause I need her to sign it. But apart from that, she also guides me through the planning of the event like budgeting, preparation, scheduling, etc. One of the learnings from her is to always think about optimistic, pessimistic, and realistic cases for your plan.
1. Pessimistic Case
When she said pessimistic case, she say “if the worst case happens, what’s your contingency plan?”. This one forces me to become Batman.
If the worst thing happen, I had to be ready and know exactly what I have to do. Simply said, I must be ready for a backup plan. For example, what if the rundown runs very late? I have to know which session needs to be shortened or might be removed. What if the room occupancies fall short? Or what if we fail to prepare the equipment for games?
We have to be calm and maintain our composure but at the same time, must be agile and flexible in a way so that we can still run the event without the attendees noticing that we’re f*cked up. It prepares me to always be ready for any kind of scenario that might happen. Thinking about this from the start heavily impacts how we’re budgeting, and how we plan — cause we also take into account the worst possible outcome. One of the examples that we do when we run our event is to add a buffer time in each of the sessions.
2. Optimistic Case
When she said optimistic case, she says “what if everything happens better than planned?”. People often think that “achieving the target” falls into the optimistic case. No… you’re wrong. An optimistic case is about “what if you far exceeded the target?”. For example, what if we made it to the venue earlier than the scheduled time? Or we have spare money from our total allocation budget.
By taking into account that the best possibility might happen, I can prepare for any improvement or “nice-to-have” things that I could do cause of the benefits that I obtained. Like maybe if we have spare money, we could use it to upgrade our accommodation or spend it on more barbeque food variants. If we have spare time cause a session finished early, maybe we can allocate the time to the next session or maybe prolong the rest time when transitioning between sessions.
I know that there is very little chance that the optimistic case will occur. But I think it’s essential to at least consider it from the start. That way, we will be better prepared and able to take advantage of the benefits we received properly and correctly.
3. Realistic Case
Most people only think about the best case and the worst case and forget about this one. It’s also often misunderstood with the best case. If you achieve your target, that’s not an optimistic case — but rather, it’s a realistic case.
It guides me to have a target in mind that we have to achieve. For example, arriving at the venue no later than 8 PM or the number of participants above 50%. We should always prepare our plan realistically so that we don’t set the target too high but not too low either, and try to strive to achieve the realistic case first. The optimistic case is more like a bonus at this point.
The realistic case also helps to measure the achievement of our current plan. In my case when planning an event, it also allows me to compare in the evaluation period later on — to see whether the actual case is the one that happened and if not, how can we improve it in the next event. In a situation where even a realistic case doesn’t happen, we should always wonder why. Cause if even your real target is not achieved, that’s a signal that there’s something wrong in your plan that you need to adjust.
This mindset has always been with me ever since. These three angles helped me a lot when I’m planning anything. From preparing a short getaway to office project management, or even a financial plan. I think many people already considered the pessimistic case, or “worst-case scenario” its other name. The realistic case is the one I would like to highlight cause sometimes people misunderstood it. Cause if you meet the target, that’s not the best case. The best case is when you far exceeded the target. I think it’s important to distinguish the two.
Btw, I found a simple graphic that best described this notion:
Hope you enjoy your story. Happy planning!
Cheers 🍻 — Ferzos
