I like making contingency plans. It's like peeking up a manifold of possibilities, imagining a sure-footed Sacha capably dealing with whatever comes down the pipe.

In preparation for a recent event, I made a list of different things that could go wrong, highlighting specific scenarios I needed to worry about and listing a few catch-all scenarios as well. Amusingly enough, the actual challenges that came up (Windows updates, network/hardware latency, a network configuration reset, Powerpoint crashes, last-minute changes) weren't on my list as specific scenarios, but they were addressed by our general back-up plans. I like the blend of specific and general. Specific scenarios help you flush out questions to ask and things to prepare, while general scenarios identify characteristics to prepare for and help you come up with flexible strategies. Both types help you minimize stress when things do happen. Knowing that you have a backup plan, what the trade-offs are, and a probable deadline for committing to that plan helps you worry less about catastrophic failure and lets you focus on coming up with a better ad-hoc option.

One of the things that I gained a better appreciation of was the trade-off between preparing in advance and waiting until you can test your hypotheses. For example, I wasn't sure if the server would be able to accept incoming connections once at the venue. I could adapt the code to run on my public webserver, but that would take a little time. However, since we were likely to be able to get things to work on the event network, I could postpone worrying about it to Sunday, which meant that I could spend Saturday doing non-work things instead.

Outside work, I also have a lot of scenarios and contingency plans. It's been interesting slowly moving through time, watching the different uncertainties resolve themselves. Doors close and new possibilities open up. Because I've scanned my personal notes and I've blogged about many of my projections, I can recall a little bit of what past-Sacha was thinking, standing on the threshold of the unknown. I tend to overestimate risks and costs, but I'm good at coming up with small tests and approaches. I'm good at tracking my progress and keeping an eye out for “trip lines,” little reminders to myself to re-evaluate the situation. I want to get better at generating more general scenarios and alternative approaches, and properly evaluating risk/reward (maybe calibrating these with other people's experiences). It's fun treating life as a Choose Your Own Adventure where you might be able to peek ahead a little! =)