Rudy, Blink! and waiting to jump in

Last week a friend invited me to attend the Get Motivated Summit!  I say that by way of disclaimer since I’d be unlikely to attend something that looks so obviously like a huge infomercial on my own, but these are interesting times and one must explore new territory.  Besides there were a few intriguing speakers like Rudy Giuliani, Steve Forbes, and Zig Zigler.  In any case while it did meet most of my expectations in terms of combining aspects of Television Evangelism, Late Night Cable Huxterism, Republican Hubris, and Professional Wrestling, there were a few interesting take-aways.  One of which came from Rudy Giuliani:

In describing his response to the events of 9/11 (of course!), Giuliani said that he realized when he got to the site that this was an unprecedented event that he had no plan to deal with.  They had 20 or 30 emergency plans dealing with everything from blackouts to suicide bombers that city emergency crews had rehearsed time and again, but nothing for this.   However he did take action and pulling bits and pieces from the other plans they had rehearsed, the response teams were able to put together a reasonably successful response.

Giuliani says that during the event he was working on instinct, but reflecting on it afterword he realized that his actions were in line with the training and advice he had received working for a federal judge as a young attorney.  When preparing for a trial, the judge said to go over every possible scenario that could come up, have a rebuttal for every argument you can think of, prepare to refute every piece of evidence, etc.  However, he said there will always be something you didn’t think of that you can’t prepare for, but having done all the other preparation you will have a model for how to respond and should be better able to think on your feet.

This resonated with something else I’d read recently in Malcolm Gladwell’s book Blink! about war games in which a team with elaborate communications who were being fed data from a computer simulation for each of their moves, were outfoxed by the unexpected moves of a rogue general and his men, whose out-of-the-box solution and nimbleness of action was based on their experience, repeatedly practicing and internalizing scenarios. When the time came to act for real, they relied on instinct and team members were given autonomy to make decisions rather than waiting for central command.

There are also parallels with the arts,  why did John Coltrane spend hours learning and practicing exotic scales?  Because he wanted to be free-er when it came time to improvise;  he didn’t need to think about the notes, they were internalized.

So what does all this have to do with business and web marketing?  I find often clients are paralyzed by all the options available and the possibility that they will invest time in the wrong social networking site or that something new will come along that no one has thought of yet and they will have wasted time learning an old technology.  I think these stories tell us that you really can’t know what to prepare for, but that everything you do gives you practice that will help you know how to approach the new thing.   It can be overwhelming so start small, but do start!