An Outside Perspective
In a consulting role for the past 12 years, I’ve worked with organizations from an outside perspective. Whether mentoring project teams in an academic environment, performing due diligence for a venture capital firm, or facilitating key team discussions, the value that I bring from the outside is something that is difficult to replace. Here’s my view on the synergy produced by this relationship. Read more
Working the Fundamentals
With all the time we have watching our kids in their activities this fall, a pattern begins to emerge. All of these activities involve practice and drills intended to improve proficiency in fundamentals of each activity: dribbling and passing in soccer and basketball, scales and chord progressions in guitar, footwork drills and off-ice practice in figure skating. While the kids generally loathe this portion of their activities, there’s a good reason for this: they are working the fundamentals. Read more
Evolving Perspectives
Filed under: Agility, Leadership, Process, Quality, Teamwork
It seems that at any point in time, the current beliefs we hold to be true are sacrosanct. We are entirely convinced that we are correct as we use these beliefs to guide our way through life. It also seems that if we look back in time, whether that is 50 years ago, twenty years ago or only five, we can identify some beliefs that were powerful then and laughable now. Can we learn anything from this? Read more
Certification vs. Education
Way back in 1939, the great and powerful Oz had this to say to the Scarecrow, who was in search of a brain:
“Why, anybody can have a brain, that’s a very mediocre commodity. Every pucilanimous creature that crawls on the earth or slinks through slimy seas has a brain.
Back where I come from, we have universities, seats of great learning, where men go to become great thinkers. And when they come out, they think deep thoughts, and with no more brains than you have.
But they have one thing you haven’t got – a diploma.
Therefore, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the Universitatis Committeatum, E. pluribus unum, I hereby confer upon you the honorary degree of Th.D. (Doctor of Thinkology).”
Receiving that piece of paper didn’t make the scarecrow any smarter, as evidenced by his screwing up pythagorean and isosceles triangle theorems. He clearly received an empty credential.
More than seventy years later, we still struggle to recognize the distinction between certification and education. Read more
Best Intentions
We’ve all been in situations where we find ourselves slogging through our work, and the focus (if there is any focus at all) is to get the work done, rather than get it done well. Certainly household chores can fall into that category, and around the office there are similar activities like month-end reporting that can feel more like drudgery than uplifting activity. It becomes easy to find excuses for not getting the work done, procrastination becomes an art form, and while the result might pass muster, it certainly isn’t a masterpiece. When the core work we do starts to feel this way, when we just want it done and over with, it’s time to rethink what’s going on. Read more
Leveraging the Frog in the Pot
Everyone has heard of that metaphor of a frog in a pot of water: put the little guy in hot water and he’ll jump right out, heat the water gradually and he’ll just hang out there. The gradual changes are too subtle for him to perceive them and do anything about it. This explains why a lot of team environments are the way they are, and might even give us an idea about what we can do about it. Read more
From Telling to Asking
Filed under: Leadership, People, Project management, Teamwork
There are a number of flavours of project management workshops I’m involved with these days, online and face to face, running the whole show or facilitating with wider participation. One thing that they all have in common is that many of the issues have to do with team dynamics, and the many ways in which this manifests itself. Here’s another example. Read more
High Cost of Success
Filed under: Leadership, People, Project management, Quality
In all kinds of projects, despite all the theory behind project management best-practices or ‘branded’ methodologies or lifecycles, I would say that the majority of projects get done with more than a little ‘seat-of-the-pants’ effort. In construction circles you will see ‘as built’ notations on the drawings, in many projects you will see a lot of scurrying, sprinkled with some long hours, and a dash or so of frayed nerves. The project gets done, we declare success, but at what cost? Read more
What’s That PMO Doing?
I was running a workshop on project management yesterday, and one of the first things I did (as usual) was to go around the room to ask what people were looking for in the session. One person volunteered that back on their project, they have a PMO that drives things, and what he wanted to get out of the session was to “find out what goes on behind those doors”. I may not know what does go on behind those doors, but I do have thought or two to share. Read more
Intentional Influence
An important consideration in projects is that, consciously or not, we all exert influence on those around us. If we are trying to make life on our projects better, we certainly effect the behaviour of others, as well as their character. We can influence them. Read more
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