Nobody posts a picture of the “stau”

Our trip through Europe is coming to an end. My wife, our two energetic staffies and me, sharing a very small camper across a lot of countries and a lot of road. Tonight is our last night in Germany. Tomorrow, Sweden.

It has been fantastic. It has also not been the holiday you typically see on your social media feed.

Two dogs put pressure on planning. Wherever we go we need poop bags and water, and forget either one at your peril. The romantic dinner outdoors at a nice restaurant, the one we pictured back in February? Not happening. We spent the whole evening scanning the street for passing dogs our two monsters would like to chew on.

And what if you get irritated with your spouse? Yes, I know, a kind of unicorn, but I’ve been told it can happen. When it does, you are in a very public place with neighbours two metres away catching every word. Not many people speak Swedish in France or Germany, true, but the number of Swedes travelling the way we do is staggering, so odds are your closest neighbour is from Borås. Watch what you say or leave the campsite very early before anyone has woken up.

Hardest of all: the German autobahn. Traffic so intense that driving becomes a full time job, roadwork every twenty kilometres, and an endless stau as the consequence. It just takes forever…

So why share the annoying parts of an otherwise wonderful trip?

Here is the thing. Scroll any platform in July and every holiday is cloudless. Perfect food, perfect light, perfect everyone. We all know that is not how life works, not even on vacation.

And it turns out that gap is not harmless.

The cost of the perfect picture

Gabriele Oettingen has spent more than twenty years studying what happens when we imagine a desired future in its finished, glowing state.

The results keep coming out the wrong way round.

Women entering a weight loss programme who fantasised most vividly about the slim version of themselves lost less weight than the women who fantasised less, and the gap was still there two years on. Hip replacement patients with the sunniest mental pictures of recovery moved worse, climbed fewer stairs and recovered less well. Graduates with vivid fantasies about the job they would land received fewer offers and lower starting salaries.

Kappes and Oettingen went looking for the mechanism and found it in energy. Positive fantasy relaxes you, physically. They could measure it in blood pressure. The brain treats the imagined arrival as a small dose of the real thing, and effort stops feeling necessary.

You can enjoy the destination now, or you can get there. Apparently not both.

The fix is not pessimism

The obvious conclusion, be gloomy instead, is also wrong. What works in Oettingen’s studies is contrast.

Picture the outcome you want, in detail. Then, immediately and just as concretely, picture the obstacle. Not the market’s obstacle. Yours. Then decide, in advance, what you will do when it turns up.

Wish, outcome, obstacle, plan. Across two dozen trials it beats positive thinking on whether people actually reach the goal.

That last step has its own literature. Peter Gollwitzer calls them implementation intentions, and they are nothing more than if-then sentences. If X happens, then I do Y. A meta-analysis of 94 tests covering more than 8,000 people found a medium to large effect on goal attainment, which is a lot for something that takes fifteen seconds to write.

The interesting part is why it works. It is not motivation. It is that the decision has already been made, so the difficult moment no longer requires thinking, only recognition.

The autumn version

Everyone reading this is a few weeks away from a plan.

The account plan, the launch plan, the access case, the engagement strategy for the professor who has not answered an email since March. Somewhere there is a slide with the target on it, and the target looks great.

Here is the question worth asking before the plan goes live: where is the stau?

Do not ask “what are the risks”. That question gets you a list nobody reads.

Ask a different one. Move a year forward, decide the plan has already failed, and write the story of why.

It sounds like the same question. It is not. In 1989, Mitchell, Russo and Pennington tested both. People asked to predict what might go wrong did worse than people asked to explain something that had already gone wrong. About 30 percent worse at naming the reasons that turned out to matter.

We are simply better at explaining than at predicting. So the trick is to stop predicting.

Gary Klein built a method on it and called it the premortem.

Teams find things in that exercise that no risk workshop surfaces, because the framing gives permission. You are no longer the person predicting failure in front of your boss. You are just the historian.

What actually separates people

There is a matching finding in the sales research.

Franke and Park pooled 155 samples covering more than 31,000 salespeople. Adaptive selling behaviour, meaning changing your approach during the meeting based on what is actually in front of you, raised performance on every measure they had. Self-rated, manager-rated, and objective numbers.

Customer orientation, the belief that you are there to serve the customer, raised exactly one. Self-rated.

Believing you are customer focused makes you feel better at your job. Adjusting in real time makes you better at it.

Most of the preparation we do in this industry builds the first thing. The story, the sequence, the objection handling, the perfect approach for the meeting we hope we get. Very little of it builds the second: the capacity to notice, halfway through, that the plan is now the wrong plan.

Back to the autobahn

We hit our biggest stau so far on the journey as we got close to Hamburg. Total stand-still. Engine off, dogs restless, arrival time on the screen climbing in a way that felt personal.

For twenty minutes I did what I always do, which is treat the delay as a personal insult.

Then my wife said we should just take the next exit.

We did. It cost us two hours. It also got us a bakery, a field where the dogs ran until they were finally, blessedly tired, and an afternoon nobody had planned. It was the best part of the day.

The plan was to arrive at ferry terminal at mid noon. The plan was fine but we never made the plan the point.

The permission

So this is what I am taking back to the desk next week.

There will be a stau, not maybe, there will be one, affecting something you care about most, probably in September.

Plan for the outcome you want. Then spend ten honest minutes on where it breaks, and decide now what you will do when it does.

A plan is great. Being able to adapt is greater.