This week my wife and I found ourselves watching the presidential debate.
We did not plan to. We just sat down and said let us see what this is about.
Five of the sixteen presidential candidates showed up. The moderator was sharp. No applause was allowed. You spoke and got nothing back. Just silence and faces watching, waiting for you to either hold up or not.
Some candidates were clear and convincing. The thinking behind the words was audible.
Others struggled.
And what I noticed watching the ones who struggled was not that they were unprepared. They had manifestos. They had been campaigning for months. They spoke with conviction. But when the question came from an angle they had not anticipated, something happened that I have been thinking about since.
The plan, which had seemed solid moments before, started showing its edges.
The candidates who struggled were not caught out by difficult questions. They were caught out by reasonable ones they had not thought to ask themselves.
Every plan is built from one angle. The angle of the person who made it. With the assumptions they brought to it. The things they had thought about and the things they had not thought to think about.
From inside the plan, the gaps are invisible. Not hidden. Invisible. Because you do not know to look for what you cannot see.
I have made plans like this. Plans that felt complete until someone asked a question I had not considered. And in the moment of not being able to answer, I understood something about the plan that I had not understood while I was making it.
The struggle to answer is not always a communication problem.
Sometimes it is the plan meeting its first honest question.
The debate ended. My wife and I turned it off and went about the evening.
But the thought that had arrived while watching did not leave with the television.
When last did I subject my own plans to the same kind of pressure? Not to someone who would agree with me. Not in my own head where the plan always makes sense. But to a question I was not expecting. From an angle I had not considered.
A few weeks ago I wrote about using the election season to set your own five year plan. This is the question that comes after.