don't forget that

ooh, you might need this too...

In the preppers' community, there is a term, EDC. This stands for Everyday Carry. It is the collection of things that you never leave the house without.

All of the kit I carry, whether for me or someone else, is about keeping the group as calm as possible. This ranges from having wet wipes so no one has sticky fingers, which in at least two members of my family would cause a meltdown, to having an inflatable cushion so I can sit in the shade when all the seats are in the sun.

Thanks to now owning a car and travelling most places in it (because there’s no other way to travel anywhere when you live so rurally), my kit weight has increased as I’ve not needed to purchase based upon how easy it is to carry in my backpack. For instance, when I needed a new portable cutlery set, I could choose a nice quality metal set rather than a lightweight plastic one.

The variable of whether or not I have my children with me makes the presence of kit that occupies small children an easy decision. I have kit that is definitely only about making my life more pleasant that I give up carrying to compensate for the size and weight of their kit. Deciding what I should put back in my bag for me when I’m not with my children is always more difficult.

I have conversations with myself about why I bother to carry such things, how frequently I actually need to use them, and what madness drove me to consider carrying such a thing in the first place. On a recent trip to Liverpool, at the point of switching from car to train, I decided that as it was raining, I would leave my sunglasses and sunscreen. When I arrived in Liverpool, the sun was bright and hot. I stayed indoors for fear of being burned and blind…

I have similar conversations with myself when I’m running workshops. I look at the plan I’ve created for the day and collect all the resources together I need to follow the plan exactly. Then, I keep gathering resources that allow me to pivot away from certain parts of the plan because the participants may need to go somewhere other than where I had planned. Then I iterate again because there may be more deviation. Then I pare back some with sympathy for my back and how I’m going to feel the next day when I’m carrying all this up and down multiple escalators or – worse still – flights of static stairs.

I wonder if there is something we can learn about how people must feel when a change agent comes in and tells everyone to give up the way they’ve done it before because we’re going to do agile now. If someone told me I couldn’t carry all the resources I believe I need to have for a successful day out of the house, I’m pretty confident I wouldn’t have a successful day out of the house. When we tell people you don’t need to run a project the way you believe you need to for a successful project, how confident are they that the project will be a successful project?

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