Should you have a Plan B?
When you are setting goals related to your career or business, should you have a Plan B?
There are successful people who argue that you absolutely should not.
Actor Will Smith said,
“There is no reason to have a Plan B because it distracts from Plan A.”
Sunny Nunan, founder of Core24, a business services networking company, told Forbes,
“Plan B’s are for chickens. Why? Because when you have no Plan B, guess what? Plan A has to work.”
Researchers Jihae Shin and Katherine Milkman studied the effect of having a Plan B and summarized their findings for Scientific American:
“...merely contemplating a backup plan can reduce the effort you put forth to achieve a goal, thus hurting your chances of achieving it.”
Despite the strong opinions like the ones above, not everyone agrees you shouldn’t have a Plan B. Ilene Gordon, CEO of Ingredion, told Business Insider:
“Have a Plan B, because Plan A doesn’t always go well, or maybe it’s derailed by a competitor or somebody else’s new product or some type of regulation.”
James A. Yorke, Distinguished University Research Professor of Mathematics and Physics, said,
“The most successful people are those who are good at Plan B.”
How do we reconcile the contradictions? I believe the answer is to know yourself.
In my coaching business, I meet clients who prefer the clarity and focus of committing to Plan A without having a Plan B as a safety net. I also meet clients who are paralyzed by anxiety unless they have a Plan B. For this second group, Plan B is what enables them to feel sufficiently centered to proceed with Plan A.
For people in creative professions, I suspect that the high level of challenge in achieving success means that only the most driven and committed will succeed, so those with an alluring Plan B are highly likely to abandon Plan A. To circumvent this, use a psychological technique called stress inoculation.
Stress inoculation aims to increase psychological resilience against stressors. Like inoculation in the medical sense, the idea is to deal with exposure to stress in a methodical way to learn adaptive strategies for dealing with the situation in the future.
In creative careers, for instance, we can expect that there will be a high level of rejection. A person embarking on a creative career should expect this and prepare in advance for how they will react. They should imagine the rejection, plan a response, and line up support before the actual rejection occurs. This way, a premature flight to Plan B is less likely.
In business, success is almost never linear and survival depends on the ability to pivot as circumstances change, so for entrepreneurs, a Plan A that is overly rigid will almost certainly ensure failure. But if Plan A is sufficiently broad, for example, “Be the best social media management company,” then you can commit fully to Plan A and change the strategy to get there as market conditions change and as you gain more information along the way.
David Kord Murray, a business consultant and author, wrote,
“Don’t pave your plans. Let them be more like water.”
Even if the market conditions stay the same for you (although they probably won’t), your Plan A might change because your needs or interests change. That’s why career changes happen. Someone decides they want something different, so they reinvent.
Viewed in this way, it resolves the tension between the competing views about Plan B. Whether you view your plan as an evolved Plan A or as a Plan B, the results are the same.
Create a Plan A.
Evaluate progress as you go.
Adapt to changing circumstances by evolving Plan A or migrating to Plan B.
Repeat.
I first published this article on 2016-12-16 at VocationVillage.com. I updated this version.
Do you prefer to have a Plan B or not? Share your story with me.
