Providence and Planning: Holding Plans Loosely

I finally had everything lined up. After a year and a half of grinding through staff augmentation work for an oil and gas client, we'd reached the moment I'd been working toward: a real technology partnership. Their main guy had left, some organizational changes happened, and suddenly we had the opportunity to do what SEQTEK actually shines at. Not just bodies in seats, but owning outcomes. Managing the work itself while they managed priorities and direction.

This is the sweet spot for companies whose core competency isn't software but who have complex software needs. They don't have what it takes to manage a development team effectively, but they have real problems that need solving. We brought on another developer from our company, got a part-time data guy, built out a team completely under our control. This was going to work.

Then, maybe a month in, we got the news. The company had decided to contract with some AI company for an AI initiative. The budget increase we'd been planning on? Gone. In fact, we were getting a cut. The whole thing fell apart.

The Moment It Falls Apart

I wish I could say I took it well. I didn't.

I was talking with the business team when they told me we'd have to lose one of the resources. This was after I'd already cut my own hours on the project so we could have a full-time developer and a part-time data person. I felt disappointment, annoyance, frustration. All of it hitting at once.

Part of it was personal. This was the culmination of a lot of my work getting destroyed. But part of it was watching the client make what I believed was a serious mistake. I'd finally worked hard to get them in a position to realize their software ambitions. Years of stuff they'd wanted to do but couldn't make happen. Now we were positioned to deliver, and they were going to lose it chasing an AI initiative.

I have to imagine this is happening all over the country right now. People watching their clients or their own companies get swept up in something. I'm not saying the consultants coming in are snake oil salesmen. A lot of them have just been drinking their own Kool-Aid. They think they can provide value they're not actually capable of providing.

So what did we actually do? We put the other resource on another project. The data guy moved on. And here we are at the end of the year with some of what we'd planned done and some of it not. That's the way the cookie crumbles.

The Advice That Sounds Good But Doesn't Work

There's this business advice floating around about being "firm on macro, open on micro." Hold your big-picture vision while letting tactics shift. And I get the appeal, but I'm not sure I agree with it.

At the very highest level, what your company is about, what you're trying to accomplish in an existential sense, sure. That's relatively stable. For us, we're trying to be the premier consulting company in the Midwest for small to medium-sized businesses. That high-level goal is where you're headed.

But everything below that has to be negotiable. Things are moving too quickly now. You can't lock in on anything. It's like that 38 Special song: hold on loosely, but don't let go. You have to hold everything with open hands.

And honestly? Sometimes you have to completely let go of even the big stuff. There could come a time when we as a company have to rethink what we're trying to accomplish entirely. That's the advantage of being small. Small and medium-sized businesses can reinvent themselves way easier than the giants.

We're entering a time where you have the massive players like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and then there's going to be a big gap, and then the smaller players. That medium-to-large but not super-giant space is going to be brutal. Too big to pivot quickly, not big enough to set the pace. The big guys are setting the pace, and even they can falter. Look at what's happening right now.

It's actually a great time to be small to medium. The agility it gives you, the lack of bureaucratic inertia, allows you to hold plans loosely and pivot when you need to.

The Real Enemy: Sunk Cost

The hardest part about letting go is always the same thing. The sunk cost fallacy.

You think about all the work you've done. All the plans you've made. The roads you've traveled. The hardships you've endured. The blood, sweat, and tears. You consider all of that as you're deciding whether to let go or keep pushing.

The reality is that's not how decision-making needs to work. You always want to think about marginal cost. What does it cost to keep going? What does it cost to pivot? What's the return on each path? That's all that matters. Everything that happened in the past is immaterial to the decision. Not immaterial in the sense that it didn't get you here. It did. But from this point forward, looking at the forking paths ahead, what you spent to get here is irrelevant.

Getting that through people's minds is incredibly difficult because people are emotional. They want to think about what happened. They want it to matter.

And here's where it gets complicated: it does matter, in a way. There's a psychic cost to pivoting. There's psychic satisfaction in continuing down the path you're on. Being wrong, wasting time and energy, admitting you need to change direction: there's a real cost to that. It's personal.

So when you're making the economic calculation, that psychic cost has to be figured into the equation. The problem is it's different for everyone. I have pretty low ego about these things. I can be dead wrong, realize we need to change direction, and feel very little attachment even if I came up with the original plan. Other people aren't wired that way.

This becomes especially hard organizationally. The psychic cost to an organization is almost impossible to measure because you can't directly compare how important something is to one person versus another. What's important to you and what's important to me are difficult to compare. We try, but it's genuinely hard.

And good luck selling that upward. "It's your ego. You need to just get over it." That doesn't work.

Cutting the Threads

I've gotten pretty good at letting go of things. Not perfect, but good.

When I need to release something, I picture it like cutting fabric. There are all these threads connecting me to the plan, the project, whatever it is. And you just cut through them. Snip. Done.

I've had to get good at this. I work in consulting, where things constantly don't go your way. Clients make the wrong call. Projects pivot. You have to suck it up and move on. At the same time, I work way better when I'm emotionally invested in what I'm doing. Those two things together: you have to master forming the attachment so it motivates you, so you can invest your time and attention easily, and then letting go of the attachment when it becomes clear things aren't going to work.

Form the attachment. Cut the attachment. There's no other way to do it in this kind of work.

What's the process? Honestly, that's what this whole post is about. You have to make the plans and hold on loosely.

And to bring in the faith element: God is in control. God has the plan overall. If things aren't going the way I think they should be going, and I'm doing the best I can, and I'm really earnestly trying hard, then I just think: there's something at play here that I'm not understanding. Maybe something I'm not capable of understanding. Maybe I don't have the right perspective to see it.

That perspective, understanding that sometimes there's information you don't know and can't know, that it would be impossible for you to know, lets you hold onto the plan but hold it loosely. Let the Lord guide you in these situations.

The Signal to Stop Salvaging

When do you know it's time to stop trying to save something? When you realize it's going to cost more to salvage the plan than to pivot and do something else. Or to just let it go completely.

That's it. That's the signal. Make the calculation, factor in the psychic costs as best you can, and when the math says pivot, pivot.

I'm not saying it's easy. When that oil and gas project fell apart, it was hard. Really hard. Viscerally I felt the disappointment, the frustration. After a year and a half, we didn't have a whole lot to show for it. A lot of things they wanted their software team to accomplish this year didn't get done because of the cut.

But you make the call. You cut the threads. You move on.

If you're working for the Lord, doing the best you can, operating with integrity, trying to act in love and use kindness, then God's got a plan to make it all work out. Maybe not the way you expected. Maybe not in a way you can see from where you're standing.

But he's on the throne. He's still in charge. He knows what's going on.

That's what lets you hold the plans loosely.