Trace the Road Backward

I was living in Thailand when my family called me home.

We have been in agriculture for more than three decades, starting as poultry traders in 1993. The farm came later. We rented it in 2019 and acquired it in 2021, and we were genuinely new to layer farming. There were permits and compliance requirements we did not know existed.

That is not an excuse; not knowing is not a defense, and the obligations existed whether or not we had read them. But it was the truth of our position, and eventually someone asked for documents we could not produce. The farm was served a notice of violation.

A skipped step does not stay where you left it. It waits, and it comes back with a bigger title.

What do you do when a problem feels too big?

Stop looking at all of it. A mountain does not tell you where to put your foot.

What I flew home to was a web. Around eight government agencies, several of them wanting more than one thing, and almost every requirement depending on a document held by another office. One permit needed a plan. The plan needed a professional we had not hired. The agency that would accept the plan needed clearance from an agency we had not yet approached.

If I had started by listing everything, I would have stopped there. Looked at whole, it was not a problem; it was a mountain.

So I stopped looking at the whole thing and started at the end.

How do you break a big problem into steps?

Start at the end and walk backward toward yourself.

Where did we need to be? Compliant, and still operating. Then the question became what had to be true immediately before that, and immediately before that, and so on, walking the road backward until it reached my feet.

The first thing the road landed on was a building plan. That was not the most important requirement and it did not fix anything by itself. What it did was unlock. A building plan meant an engineer and an architect, which meant a week of finding them, briefing them and paying them. Once that existed, an environmental management plan became possible, and that document in turn told me which agencies we actually had to face and in what order.

The farm already held its local government permits and an environmental compliance certificate from the acquisition. The rest we obtained from six national agencies:

• Department of Agriculture
• Department of Agrarian Reform
• National Irrigation Administration
• Laguna Lake Development Authority
• Department of Environment and Natural Resources
• National Water Resources Board

We reached full compliance without losing a single day of operations.

I was not solving eight agencies. I was solving the next thing that made the following thing possible.

I think about it the way a swimmer enters the water. On the dive, they are not stroking; the entry itself carries them, and they start swimming once the momentum is already there. The skill is not in thrashing harder. It is in choosing where to break the surface.

Strategy often works the same way. The best move is rarely the one that solves the most. It is the one that makes the next five easier.

Should you move fast or get it right?

Usually, but not always, and the exception matters.

For a long time I said direction is better than speed, and I still think that holds most days. If you do not know where you are going, moving faster only gets you lost sooner.

But I have watched situations where that is wrong. A business facing a payment tomorrow may have to take an expensive loan today, because an elegant solution arrives after the company has closed. Survival outranks efficiency.

So the way I put it now is different. Direction is not the opposite of speed; enough direction is what tells you when speed matters. You need to know the road well enough to recognize the stretch where you must sprint and the stretch where sprinting is just fuel spent on a wrong turn.

How do you plan for things you cannot see coming?

You cannot. You can only leave room for them.

There is one more part of this I do not want to leave out, because it is the part that keeps the roadmap from becoming a cage.

I am a strategist. I like planning, I like anticipating problems, and I like the feeling of a structure that holds. But I can only prepare for what I know exists.

I am Christian, and this is where faith enters my thinking. I have to leave room for God, and for the things I could not have written into the plan. An unexpected person accelerates something you thought would take years. A course teaches you the skill you did not know was missing. A relationship opens a door that was never on the map.

I am not saying faith guarantees an outcome. It does not, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something. What it does is keep me honest about the limits of my own planning, and willing to redraw the road when reality offers a better one.

You cannot control every variable. You can control your direction, your effort, and your willingness to change the route without changing the destination.

Trace the road backward until it reaches your feet. Then take the step that is actually in front of you.

Plan backward. Stay present. Leave room for grace.