Robin Wilson

“Everyone has the will to win, but it’s only those with the will to prepare that do win.”
- - Bobby Knight

t was said when Michael Phelps won the gold meadow for swimming that he practiced 6 hours a day – 6 days a week – even on holidays. An athlete knows what they need to do to win a game or compete in a big event. However, for most of us we don’t have the luxury to practice 6 hours a day at our craft. What we do have though is time to prepare and plan.

I often do a team building exercise in training sessions where I split people up into small groups and they put together a helicopter. I go into this spiel about the monsoon season and their only hope for survival out of this dessert island is to build a helicopter. Soon the race is on between the teams to see who can complete their helicopter so it is flight ready in the shortest amount of time. Each team has someone act as a time keeper and record the amount of time they spend planning and how much time they spend actually putting the craft together. Interestingly enough almost 100% the groups that spend the most time planning are the ones that get their craft flight ready in the shortest time period. Now for some, this may run contrary to what we might think. Conventional thinking may say that the key to winning in this scenario is people working together and staying very focused on the task at hand. Certainly, those are important ingredients but without the upfront preparation and understanding – the actual task takes longer.

Rudy Giuliani former mayor of NY City tells a story of a judge that gave him advice early in his career that for every hour you will spend in court – you should spend 4 hours preparing and practicing. Be prepared that something will always go wrong. Giuliani attributes this advice to helping him navigate through the September 11th crisis. Although, no one could have predicted what happened that day, they had prepared for other events such as loss of power or poisonous gas attacks. Those emergency drills gave him and the city the knowledge and skills to react effectively and expediently on the day of the disaster. It’s not that some people are better at thinking on their feet than others – it’s that they are more prepared and therefore able to think on their feet.

Preparation is the key, yet I will bet that few of us actually spend enough time preparing, rehearsing and planning. Most people use lack of time as the excuse but as I learned in facilitating the helicopter exercise without plan and preparation we end up with busy activities that lead to the unintended results. The only ingredient we can count on when things don’t work out is ourselves and if we are prepared we can rise to any challenge that comes our way. Let us hope that our challenge won’t be as big as Rudy Giuliani’s was on 9/11 but be prepared for the unexpected and be able to respond quickly and effectively because preparation creates opportunities.