So what do I want to be next?

In my first post, I talked about being "on the beach", in-between projects. When you're on the beach you get a lot of time to reflect about what you want to do next. That's because just about everybody you see will ask you two kinds of questions: "Are you on the beach?" or "Are you still on the beach?" And then, "What do you think you'll do next?" or "What do you want to do next?"
For example, just the other day I encountered two interesting, fairly equivalent versions of this question. A TW friend and I were headed to get some lunch. "Would you want to be an Agile coach for your next assignment?" she asked. Later that day, I was filling out a questionaire regarding a possible assignment in India as trainer for our internal education program. The form asked, "What would be your ideal experience as a trainer?"

Interesting. What would be my ideal experience of an experience I had never had before?

Let's think about this awhile and put it into perspective. You've never been to the moon. What would be your ideal experience of a moon trip? You've never hiked Spain's Camino de Santiago. What would be your ideal experience of that? You've never driven Route 66. You've never dog-sledded to the North Pole, worked a commercial fishing boat in Alaska, given birth to triplets, or manned an election campaign office, etc. etc.

If you've never done something before, how do you have an ideal of that experience?

And then it comes to me....

You can talk to other people who have done it and you can read guide books or other resources and find films or videos about the thing. You can get all sorts of advice and ideas and work out a really good plan for how things should go and what you'll do at each key milestone. You can even chart it out with timeboxes and checklists and make reservations for all the big events and must-see/do highlights...but hey, that's just big design upfront, isn't it? That's just waterfall living.

I waterfalled myself and my partner around Hawaii's Big Island in one day but we had to get halfway into the plan before it was clear that plan was too ambitious and we were not going to have an ideal experience. In hindsight, I could work out a much better vacation schedule.

Yep, I firmly believe you have to have an experience first before you can be in any position to decide what would be an ideal version of that experience.

Until you start doing that new thing you've never done before, you have no qualifications to judge what would compose an "ideal" version of that thing. You have to start from personal experience, evaluate events, acknowledge what worked (is working) well, adjust whatever is in your power to improve and leave lots of open space to shift directions and change plans. That's the agile way.