Yes, even giving up. We're not nearly as clever as we might hope to be when it comes to designing our roadmaps into the future. Success stories are written ex post facto, after the success has been realized. Of course they might hope to explain what one should do beforehand to engineer success, but they would have to have been written beforehand, then result in success, to be credible testimony.
I'm writing this posting while feeling as though I've accomplished something remarkable. Last week, Amy and I created another Mastering Projects Workshop, and the experience was remarkable. I have not spent too much time post facto fussing about how we managed to create that experience because I'm sure that I have no idea what the real causes might have been for the satisfying result. You see, I've been around the block enough times to distrust cause/effect conclusions.
And I don't want to replicate my past success the next time. My next success will have to exceed my expectations to fully satisfy me, and replicating my past experiences won't cut it.
Daniel Gilbert wrote a very interesting book called Stumbling On Happiness. In it, he explained why it is that people who win the lottery typically end up feeling miserable. The scenario we envision as the source of our happiness is different when we experience it directly. We anticipate selectively, neglecting to consider the effect of all our instant relatives showing up, hat in hand, will have on our satisfaction. The same effect is at work even in our best laid plans.
The progression for me has moved from planful to present. Sure, I take care of the logistical details AND I remember to forget what I couldn't possibly know yet before stepping into another experience. I'm thinking my presence might well be more important contributors to my successes than my planning ever was.
I'm learning to lean into these experiences.
A huge part of leaning into experience for me involves becoming more aware of my surroundings. What under other circumstances might be an experience becomes at these times especially instructive, as if someone had produced a movie especially for my learning at this time. This morning, I stumbled upon a marvelous poem, written by Humbarto Maturana, Prayer of the Student.
I can imagine no better reminder of the real relationship between teacher and student than these fine thoughts
Prayer of the Student
Don't impose on me what you know.
I want to explore the unknown
And be the source of my own discoveries.
Let the known be my liberation, not my slavery.
The world of your truth can be my limitations,
Your wisdom, my negation.
Don't instruct me; let's learn together.
Let my richness begin where yours ends.
Show me so that I can stand
On your shoulders.
Revel yourself so that I can be
Something different.
You believe that every human being
Can love and create.
I understand, then, your fear
When I ask you to live according to your wisdom.
You will not know who I am
By listening to yourself.
Don't instruct me; let me be.
Your failure is that I be identical to you.
Humbarto Maturana (translation byMarcial F. Losada)
I defer the act as long as possible. I never reset the alarm clock before going to bed the night before. If I leave the clock untouched, I'll gain an hour the next morning, when I might need it. But whenever I finally decide to cave into common practice and reset my clock, I feel myself falling backwards into short days and what will most certainly feel like mid-afternoon sunsets.
Today will be a warm day, but colder days are coming, days made dark by the early arrival of sunset and not improved a lick by the earlier sunrise.
So, I felt myself falling backwards this morning as I reset my watch. The alarm clock? I'll probably wait a few days before finally accepting the inevitable and falling backwards into my bed.
I am a time traveler. I don't make great leaps into the future or the past, but move a sparse hour either way. Forward with great anticipation every spring, then backwards, losing my optimism in the fall. Now a fallen man, I move forward slightly out of synch until spring brings my real time back on line.
Some might be under the mistaken impression that the Big Dig was just a large construction project. It wasn't. Sure, it featured a lot of construction work, much of it stuff that had quite literally never been tried before or never tried on such a scale. But as I've been saying for years and years, the greatest danger in projects, whether they be "construction" projects or "software" projects comes in the label we casually assign to the effort.
Big Dig has a lot of potential meanings, from large insult to deep pit, to huge bite.
Hey, this was complicated stuff. A third of the cost was spent on "mitigation." Mitigation is comprised of all that stuff that creates support for the effort. The helping others find their project within your project. And The Big Dig did a marvelous job of gaining initial support.
An article entitled Lessons of Boston’s Big Dig by Nicole Gelinasin appears in the Autumn 2007 issue of City Journal. Quoting from that article:
"Mitigation made downtown businesses happy, promising not to shut down any of the Central Artery’s six lanes during construction, and promising further that companies such as Fidelity Investments wouldn’t lack electricity or telephones for even a few hours as contractors dug up miles of utilities to make room for underground highways. Mitigation made Gillette, Boston’s biggest manufacturer, happy, working with the company to marry its complicated underwater infrastructure to the Big Dig’s. Mitigation made the post office happy, building temporary roads to a distribution station. Mitigation made airport neighbors happy, vowing that cars from the airport tunnel wouldn’t exit onto residential land. Mitigation also made environmentalists happy with its promise to preserve as open space three-quarters of the land that the Artery’s demolition would create (the highway tunnels that would run underneath couldn’t support heavy construction, anyway). It made more ambitious environmentalists happy, promising to improve mass transit and to use some of the excavated dirt—which, because it had saltwater in it, couldn’t be dumped inland—to transform a Boston Harbor island from a noxious landfill into a beachfront park. It made archaeologists happy, paying to catalog artifacts dating back to colonial days. It didn’t make rats happy: after near-hysteria that construction would unleash vermin whose underground lairs also dated to colonial days, the project launched an aggressive rodent-control program.
"The
mitigation, some of which was sensible, tempered even reasonable
criticism of the Big Dig. Few locals voiced skepticism during
planning. Once you got your own interest protected, you kept quiet,
to make sure that the project, free of local opposition, would win
federal funding. Thanks largely to mitigation efforts, more than 80
percent of Boston residents and nearly two-thirds of state
residents supported the Big Dig in its early years."
Gelinasin speaks of colossal mismanagement and I wonder how it might have been better managed, given the contradictions that existed at the time. There are lessons here for future Digs, but I have to wonder what they might be. How would you organize an innovative thirty year effort? My sense is that the effort was essentially unmanagable in the context within which it occurred. And also, that we'll have to wait perhaps thirty years to determine its success. By then, how the development was managed will be a fading memory. Performance over time will be the final judge.
My piece considering this curious contradiction is in today's Projects@Work. (Mildly annoying registration required.)
Here's the link!
