BookYol

Concept

ABZ Planning

ABZ Planning is Reid Hoffman and Ben Casnocha's method, from The Start-up of You, for holding three career plans at once: Plan A, what you are doing now; Plan B, a nearby direction you can pivot to; and Plan Z, a fallback that makes it safe to take risks.

Most career plans are a single line from here to a target, and they break the moment the market or the person changes. Hoffman and Casnocha borrow from how start-ups operate: commit to a direction, but expect to adjust it. Plan A is your current way of using your competitive advantage, the work you are actively doing. Plan B is what you switch to if Plan A stops working, or if you learn something that makes another direction better. It is usually close to Plan A, the same skills in a different setting or the same setting in a different role, and you prepare for it before you need it. Plan Z is the lifeboat: a concrete, if unappealing, fallback that would keep you afloat if everything else failed, such as returning to an earlier kind of work or cutting expenses sharply for a while. Plan Z matters because it caps the downside. Once you know the worst case is survivable, you can take intelligent risks with Plans A and B instead of clinging to safety. The authors favour small, reversible steps when moving between plans, testing a Plan B on the side before betting on it, which is the career version of a start-up pivot.

A real-life example

Gizem is a social media manager at a cosmetics brand in Istanbul; that is her Plan A. Her Plan B is performance marketing, close to what she already does, so she runs the brand's small paid campaigns on the side to build a track record. Her Plan Z is written down: six months of savings and a standing offer of freelance content work from a former manager. With Z on paper, she felt able to ask for the larger campaign budget nobody else wanted to own.

How to use it

  1. 1Write your Plan A in one line, then a Plan B that reuses your skills in a nearby role or industry.
  2. 2Describe your Plan Z concretely: the money, the people and the fallback work that would carry you through the worst case.
  3. 3Choose one small, reversible step toward Plan B that you can take this month without leaving Plan A.