This battered horoscope has been sitting on one bulletin board or another for uncounted years.  I can only imagine the state I was in as a project manager when I clipped it from a Sunday paper -- the only day of the week that I actually read my horoscope.  I have no idea today what "geese" I was being handed as a solution or why I thought that "swans" were the right answer.  However. this advice follows closely on yesterday's comments on wishing your life away.

As a project manager, we often get tempted to try to put a square peg into a round hole just so that we have the illusion of progress and can boast that the plan has not changed.  Often, if we are holding that square peg which came to us as perhaps a deliverable, and the plan says that it should be round, we need to ask the question about which is wrong, the peg or the hole.  Our plan could have changed underneath us and what we really need is that square peg and the hole that needs to receive it is now the wrong shape.

Typically, we assume that the deliverable is incorrect.  We are trained to be inflexible with our plans, to not see that the world has changed and that deliverable is just what we need to both succeed and redo the plan.  The last stanza of Verse 76* of the Tao gives us a hint of what we need to do to both live and be flexible.

"An army that cannot yield
     will be defeated
A tree that cannot bend
      will crack in the wind

Thus, by nature's own decree
     the hard and strong are defeated
     while the soft and gentle are triumphant"

*Tao Te Ching, The Definitive Edition, Lao Tzu with Translation and Commentary by Jonathan Star, Jeremy P Tarcher/Penguin, 2001, page 89