Should You Plan for Competition… or Prepare for It?

By Barry Lenson

Author’s note: Most blog posts offer advice. (“Do this . . . do that.”) This post is different, because instead of offering advice, I am asking you readers to help me figure out an issue that I have been thinking about. Will you help me?

I have been thinking lately that planning and preparation are not the same thing.

• When you plan to do something, you set out a series of steps you will take.
• When you prepare to do something, you cultivate knowledge and abilities that you can count on if the need arises.

So although people sometimes use the two words interchangeably, they represent different activities. I think that in order to succeed in different situations, we need to both plan and prepare.

But it’s a bit more complicated than that.

An Example of Planning

Let’s say you are about to enter negotiations to purchase another company. So you plan steps you will try to follow in your first meeting. Perhaps you will first float a dollar offer and see what happens. If things do not move ahead after that, you could plan some bargaining chips you will be prepared to offer. Maybe you will offer the company a chance to keep its current name or retain control of operations in a certain region, for example. Or you could offer to retain certain executives from the company you hope to acquire. But the bottom line is, you have a Step A, followed by a Step B and so on. By following a planned sequence, you hope to reach an agreement you have defined. 

An Example of Preparation

Let’s say that in the meeting we described just above, the executive you are negotiating with makes a phone call to one of his company’s subsidiaries, which happens to be in Mexico. It’s on the squawk box, you happen to speak Spanish and you join in  – you learned Spanish because you felt it is needed in business today. Plus, you have engaged in similar negotiations in the past, so you are at ease talking about the financial side of your negotiations. You have a personal preparation package that’s made up of education, experiences, and abilities you can call upon if and when you need them. That preparation augments and enhances your planning, but it is not the same thing.

Plan and Prepare

So if you want to compete successfully, you probably need to both plan and prepare. I think we can agree on that.

However, I believe that competition is more complicated than those two examples illustrate. To succeed, we also need to analyze the kind of competition we are entering.

Here are two varieties I have learned about.

One-on-one competition against a visible opponent

I learned a bit about this kind of competition during my younger years, when I was competing in free-fighting martial arts competitions. Sometimes I knew my opponent from previous contests, sometimes not.

Sometimes I would make a plan. I once decided I would start aggressively, by punching my opponent in the chest as hard as I could, and then do something else – I could not define a second step. I sometimes planned to pace myself at the start of a fight and try to tire my opponent, at which point I would turn up my energy and try for a win.

But after entering a number of competitions, I concluded that about 90% of planning was essentially pointless, because I was competing against one other person, and who knew exactly what he or she would do? So I tried to walk onto the mat with an empty mind and simply rely on my training – preparation, not planning – to get me through.

And another thing. I soon concluded that a lot of the popular fads about competing, such as using positive words and visualization before a fight, were essentially useless in a high-energy confrontation against another person. It gets pretty intense out there.

One-on-one competition against invisible opponents

I have some experience in this kind of competition too, in a different area. I pursued a career as an opera singer for more than a dozen years in New York – a highly competitive field that is clearly much different from martial arts.

In those days, I often auditioned for opera companies. This was a fascinating way to compete against people I could not even see. In some cases, I was auditioning to sing a particular role in a certain  opera. I knew that other singers were competing for that same role too, but in most cases, I had no idea who they were. Was I better than they were? Was the opera company hoping to hire somebody like me, or somebody different? I’d audition and then wait to hear whether I had gotten the job.

Preparation was of paramount importance – the years I had spent in music conservatory mastering languages and learning to sing and act. If I were auditioning for the role of, say, Ernesto in the Italian opera Don Pasquale, I would plan to start my audition by singing one aria from that opera and then a second aria from it too, if I was asked to do so. I would also come prepared to sing selections from several other operas – maybe one in German and one in French – just to show I had some versatility. (Also, who knew if the opera company were planning to produce a German or French opera after Don Pasquale . . . maybe I would be exactly right for that?)

It was all a kind of amorphous competition. But overall, preparation seemed to be more important than planning what would take place in a competitive audition.

The Many Faces of Competition

There are so many kinds of competitive situations: against one visible opponent, an unknown opponent, a group of decision-makers, and on it goes.

Is it possible to think about an upcoming competitive event and decide how much to plan and how much to prepare?

As I noted at the start of this post, I am trying to graph this all out and decide. I’m wondering, will you offer some thoughts and help me understand?

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