The Sixth Strength: AKA, a planner's nightmare

So the sixth strength of mine is Arranger. According to the book, Arranger is:

You are a conductor. When faced with a complex situation involving many factors, you enjoy managing all the variables, aligning them and realigning them until you are sure you have arranged them in the most productive configuration possible... But others, lacking this theme, will be in awe of your ability. "How can you keep so many things in your head at once?" they will ask. "How can you stay so flexible, so willing to shelve well-laid plans in favor of some brand-new configuration that has just occurred to you?" You are at your best in dynamic situations. Confronted with the unexpected, some complain that plans devised with such care cannot be changed, while others take refuge in the existing rules or procedures... Instead, you jump into the confusion, devising new options, hunting for new paths of least resistance, and figuring out new partnerships - because, after all, there might just be a better way.

This one also hits home! The one insight this shows is that people who like to plan get stressed out by my tendency to want to keep flexible. At work I've been told I stress out our planners. We had this light hearted exchange once:

Planner: You know, when you fail to plan, you plan to fail.
Me: Well, there's also the saying "Plan early, plan twice."

I think the thing is, I'm very balanced in terms of right and left brains. I just Googled a right vs left brain test, and it came out like this:

I basically responded as a right brained person to 9 questions, and left brained to 9 questions. For me, planning too early, or planning in more detail than the information you have, is painful to me. I think it's because my right brain is much better at solving problems when it's early or ambiguous and using the left brain in this case feels very wasteful. Unfortunately, P&G is an extremely left brained company.

The exercising of Discovering my Strengths is really cool for me... I have the dreamer type strengths, i.e. Ideation and Futuristic, but I also have the practical, get things done type strengths, i.e. Strategic, Arranger. I think that's a neat combination! In a few words, I'm a bridge to a lot of things. I actually would say I'm a surfactant, but I would hafta do too much explaining to non-chemical nerds (among other things, a surfactant allows oil and water to mix because it has both characteristics in its structure). Is this my knack for weird analogies kicking in? I tend to jump back and forth between left and right brain, being a Gen Yer or a GenXer, being American and being Chinese, being able to appreciate a beautiful sunset, and knowing that it's beautiful because of all the light refracting in the atmosphere and creating all that color.