We watched “Home Alone” last night, the perennial Christmas favorite pitting spunky 8-year-old Kevin, accidentally left home alone, against two baddies who want to burgle his house.
The pinnacle of the movie is the face-off between Kevin and the robbers. Kevin has set up an ingenious series of booby traps, and the robbers walk right into each one of them—the icy steps, the paint cans swinging from an upstairs bannister to hit them in the head, the glass ornaments arrayed right underneath a window, ready to break painfully under bare feet.
Kevin stays one step ahead of them the whole time, enjoying how his plan is working, scampering down halls and up steps. His strategy is playing out just like he planned! He’s going to win!
Until.
One of the burglars gets too close and grabs his ankle as he is running up the stairs. Kevin can’t shake him loose, and there’s no part of his plan that can help him here. How can Kevin prevail?
Happily, when his older brother’s terrarium broke earlier in the movie, it released a tarantula. That tarantula is now crawling a couple of steps up from where Kevin is sprawled. Kevin spies it, reaches and reaches his fingers, and is able to grab the spider and throw it at the man holding his ankle. Freedom!
Some may say that Kevin was lucky that the tarantula happened to be right where he needed it. I say that strategy, while crucial, only gets us so far, and then we have to be able to improvise with whatever comes to hand.
We can plan our strategy. Improvisation, by its nature, cannot be planned, yet we know that we can’t control every element of our strategy. There always comes a moment when we are, figuratively, sprawled on the stairs looking for the next move. The way we respond in those moments can mean the success or failure of our enterprise.
When are you great at improvising? When do you want to stick to the plan, even though it’s not working?
