Rue Goldberg machines blend engineering, creativity, and autonomy. Designing and building a contraption is an art form. It requires the ability to trial scenarios and use objects in innovative ways. Watching the finished product in action can feel anticlimactic since we anticipate all the obstacles have been removed.

It occurs to me that some groups committed to strategic planning view their process as assembling a Rue Goldberg. They intend to design an elaborate apparatus, commit to a period of trial and error, and then reach a state of predictability where initiating a single event at the start will reach a desired ending. While relying on ingenuity and being flexible in deploying everyday initiatives are consistent with many planning efforts, the controlled environment is unrealistic. Obstacles are what divide planning and acting. We can always reach for tomorrow but only have today to shape the behaviors and processes that will impact our trajectory.

How might we remain flexible as we activate our plan on a daily basis? How might we recognize our plan is at best an outline, if not just some scribbled notes in the margin? How might we embrace the unanticipated instead of building elaborate set pieces to avoid disruption?