Coaching practices for Contingency Planning Goals

Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For Contingency Planning Goals, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.

Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?

• My plans hold up fine until something throws them off
• I’ve got a contingency plan for every risk I could name, and yet every time it’s the thing I never listed that actually knocks me over
• My plan only works if a whole chain of things all go right
• My goals are always mushy
• I’m all-in on this plan and can barely make myself imagine it going wrong

Practices that may help

1. Plan for obstacles with coping plans
   Anticipate the specific obstacles most likely to block your plan and pre-decide your response to each.
   Action Planning
2. Build plans with slack for outcomes outside your model
   Reserve capacity for events that are not in your risk model — because the most damaging events usually aren’t.
   The Ludic Fallacy: When You Mistake Real Life for a Game
3. Audit plans for scenario inflation
   Before committing to a plan that depends on multiple things going right, count the dependencies.
   The Conjunction Fallacy — When "More Details" Feels More Likely
4. Specify target behaviors precisely before designing any reward system
   Contingency management fails when the target behavior is fuzzy — define exactly what earns the reward, in observable terms.
   Contingency Management and Token Economies
5. If–Then Planning, Made Practical
   If–then plans (also called implementation intentions) specify in advance how you will respond to the specific situations that typically derail your goals: "If situation X occurs, then I will do Y." A meta-analysis of 94 studies found a medium-to-large effect on goal attainment — one of the most reliable single techniques in goal-setting research.
6. Run a pre-mortem from the outside-view perspective
   Imagine the project has failed — then ask which base-rate failure type caused it.
   The Outside View
7. Run the basic pre-mortem
   Assume the plan failed, then have everyone write down why.
   The Pre-Mortem: Imagine It Already Failed
8. Design decisions so they work even if some things go wrong
   Ask: does this plan require everything to go right? If so, redesign it.
   Margin of Safety
9. Test your action plan for specificity before relying on it
   Before counting on a plan, check that a stranger could execute it from your written description — if not, it is not specific enough.
   Action Planning
10. Review and update action plans at a fixed weekly cadence
    An action plan that is not reviewed weekly becomes stale — regular review keeps the plan matched to current reality.
    Action Planning

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