Last week I wrote about starting to run Facebook Lives and how uncomfortable they feel. But, knowing that this is the only way to get better at them, my attitude must be “practice makes perfect” and press on.
Well, I had a comment about my post from Brent, who said that “practice actually makes perfect practice.”
He clarified that practice can only take you so far. You need the experience in a real-world situation.
I agree!
When you lead a meeting, for example, you can prepare for every contingency you can think of, but you just can’t predict everything your team will ask or what objections they may have.
Here’s another example: eventually need to stop running scenarios and actually go Live with your project. There is a point at which you stop reducing technical risk and simply increase the cost of delay. No project is perfect. Something unexpected will happen!
My take is this: when we practice, we eliminate the biggest risks. When we prepare for questions or complete all required testing, we take those issues right off the table. Then, when we’re in that real-world situation, we can focus our attention on the smaller group of unknowns.
So it is actually your practice that makes it possible to better deal with the unknown.
At the end of the day: prepare, execute, adapt.
Prepare as much as you can to eliminate risk.
Execute as you prepared.
Adapt to resolve new issues.