Today I wanted to suggest a direction to some students for a research project. It’s such a simple plan, I thought to myself.
So I gathered them into our conference room, and described the project, jotting down notes on the wall-sized whiteboard as a went. There was this piece and that to implement, and these people to work with, and that production schedule, because some things need to happen before others.
Soon I needed to move to another part of the whiteboard to start a new section of the description, because there was a part of the project I hadn’t thought about explaining. Then that part of the whiteboard filled up as well.
By the time I was done, my simple plan was filling a large portion of the wall-sized whiteboard. There were a lot of moving parts, and ways that they needed to fit together.
It had all seemed so simple when it was still all in my head. I guess in the real world, no plan is that simple.
“If you give a mouse a cookie…”