The Sisyphus Chronicles

We call them many things, from adages and aphorisms, to maxims, proverbs, old sayings and memorable quotations, but regardless of how we’ve labeled these sage old saws, they all deliver exactly the same thing. They are all, snippets of wisdom, lessons learnt, sometimes at great expense through hard won life experience. Together they provide a large library of life lessons, all neatly encapsulated into pithy phrases. Sometimes they’re repeated so often, they lose meaning through excessive exposure.

Somewhere along the line we arrived at a point where we shun the simple in favour of the complex.

We’d rather take a long, expensive University course on Ethics, than adhere to the ancient Golden Rule, “Do unto others, as you would have them do unto you.”

We’d rather invest in extensive quality programmes, than follow the advice of an old carpenter, “Measure twice, cut once.” And we need to be beaten into submission before taking regular backups, rather than remembering, “An ounce of prevention, is worth a pound of cure.”

Despite our proven reluctance to follow these inherently simple bits of advice, all of them demonstrate a remarkable ability to survive in our global consciousness. Every country, every culture has a variation on, “Look before you leap!”, “A stitch in time saves nine” and “Slow and steady wins the race.” They persist from one generation to another because, even though we don’t always pay them any heed, we offer them as our best possible advice. We practice a bizarre contradiction, we know these sayings contain deep truths, but we choose to ignore both our own knowledge and the wisdom of the past.

While there are many management (and personal) challenges, the most important of them all, and perhaps the most intractable, is the answer to the question, “Why don’t we do, what we know we should do?”

While I don’t think there’s a simple answer to the question as to why we ignore what we know, I do believe there’s a proven strategy to overcome this human flaw. Pay conscious attention to what we’re doing, and compare what we’re doing, to what we know we should be doing.

That’s so obviously true that it’s almost one of the maxims we’re discussing. In a sense it’s nothing more than a verbose variation of “Look before you leap!” or even “An ounce of prevention, is worth a pound of cure.” Is it any less true because of that similarity?

One could examine our organizations and identify problems solvable and avoidable if only we consistently followed a set of simple maxims, but that could get awfully complicated faster than we could blink. Imagine having a “Department of Aphorism Audits & Accounting”, or an “Administration of Adept Adages”? The mind boggles and things just get silly.

A simpler approach, (and that’s the goal… right?) is to adopt a personal motto and measure all our actions against its succinct guidance. No, my personal motto isn’t, “Keep it Simple Stupid” (although it could be as evidenced by this article), mine is a little more suited to the world’s laziest man, “Never do today, what you can put off until tomorrow!” (Consider this advice carefully, it doesn’t necessarily mean what most people take it to mean. As an exercise for the reader, think of it in terms of Pareto’s 80/20 Principle and a rationally prioritized to-do list.)

The obstacle to all of this sage advice (the traditional proverbs and maxims, not my ramblings) is still the point identified in the second paragraph; we shun the simple, and insist on elevating the importance of the complicated, and costly. The phrase, “This can’t work, it’s too simple” is heard frequently in most organizations, along with another thought, “If it costs more, it must be better.” (The retailers of the world salute this thought process.)

So? If all the accumulated wisdom of the world is to have any value, we have to pay attention to at least one small snippet of it. What truth will you make your own? What one bit of advice will you measure all your actions against?

If you get comfortable enough with that concept, what one truth would you select as the foundation of how your team, department or organization operates? Start with just one, and if that becomes second nature, then add another one, move slow and steady and win the race. Remember big trees fall under small strokes. Aw heck… you get the idea.

Regardless of our circumstances we often share the same thoughts. The notion “It can’t happen here”, is such a common way of looking at disaster, that even Kissinger got into the act with his famous “There cannot be a crisis next week. My schedule is already full.”

Humor aside, disasters happen regardless of what you had planned for the week. How badly they affect us, is determined by our ability to respond without warning to crisis situations.

The traditional approach to disaster planning is to create a methodology, install contingency plans, ensure that proper backups of crucial data are made, and place all this documentation in yellow binders on a shelf. If we’re diligent, we take it out once a year for some exercise.

This way of planning for disaster, while it provides many benefits, also contains a serious flaw. It’s not so much the cost - insurance of any type always costs money. The flaw is more subtle, but it is potentially serious enough to scuttle the best laid plan.

It is this, Disasters by their very nature, happen unexpectedly. Our success on the day is based upon how we react when we’re confused and don’t know what’s going on. Planning allows us to think through the process of what to do if (when?) something happens, before it actually occurs. That thought process alone is the central core of any contingency plan, but just thinking about it, isn’t enough. We have to go into the water before we know how to swim. We have to live it, to learn from it. Planning for the experience is not the same as experiencing the plan.

How to improve a disaster recovery plan? Given the stated nature of disasters, ‘unexpectedly and without warning’ seems like the right approach.

At 9:00am on a Monday morning, inform 50% (or a mere dozen if that would be too disruptive) of your management team, individually and personally, that they’re leaving immediately for an off site location for an emergency meeting. No prior warning. No details provided. No excuses accepted. All meetings regardless of importance are ignored. No notification to secretaries/assistants or clients allowed. All cell phones and blackberries collected. In other words, just like a real life crisis.

When they arrive via the waiting bus, they’re told of the ‘disaster’ that has taken place. They are to respond to this ‘disaster’ over the next day or two. What is the ‘disaster’? That depends on how severe you want it to be and what you think would provide the best information.

There’s a certain beauty to this exercise – NO PREPARATION IS REQUIRED. (except possibly for the bus) The Exercise starts at 9:00am when your employees are informed. NO hotel is booked – no coffee pre-ordered, no Flip Charts on site.

I already hear the objections… we need to book the hotel in advance otherwise…

Question… on the day our building is on fire, bombed, flooded, the senior exec team all killed in an air crash, captured by ninjas etc. etc. will we already have a room booked? If we cannot manage this minuscule exercise in crisis – then we are fundamentally incapable of handling a real emergency.

Back at the office the remainder of the management team can take the exercise one step further and pretend the entire off site team are victims of a disaster. This secondary exercise might be more than your organization can handle without severely impacting day-to-day operations. The alternative is to merely explain what is going on and cope with their unexpected absence for two days (week?). There is learning even this minimalist approach.

The exercise provides two benefits. First? An immediate and relatively inexpensive evaluation of how well your management team responds to an unexpected crisis.

Secondly? In a very short period of time, with minimal impact to your organization, you highlight those areas most vulnerable to the ‘disaster’ you selected. With that in hand you can now move forward to a ‘real’ contingency plan with specific objectives in mind.

The objections to this exercise are many and obvious. You can’t afford the time. The board would object. You can’t afford the negative impact to the business. Your schedule is full next week.

Asimov’s classic “Foundation” is the purest form of SF. It takes a fundamental desire - our need to predict the future - then presents a “What if?” scenario and pushes it to the boundaries of belief. Whenever I’ve read “Foundation”, I’ve always spent more time wrestling with the central idea than actually enjoying the story line.

Is it possible, will it ever be possible, to predict how people will react to a specific event, to any useful degree of accuracy? Are there rules, perhaps waiting for a Seldon to discover and formalize for human behaviour? Will it be possible to use an understanding of those rules to shape the future? Could our tomorrows become manufactured products of calculated action?

I first read “Foundation” during my second last year of high school. I was, by any reasonable definition, a ‘geek’… not quite of the pocket protector crowd, but I owned a slide rule and knew how to use it. My buddies at the time were also addicted to SF and we spent many hours arguing over the possibilities presented by the science of Psychohistory.

We were then presented with an opportunity to use our high school as a grand experiment.

Like most high schools we had a Student council, elected by the students, and responsible for school activities such as parties, fund raising, proms and concerts. We also, like many other schools, had a raging case of student body apathy. Nobody attended school functions, sports events or concerts. School spirit was non-existent.

We, a cadre of invisible students, devoid of popularity, suffering from a dearth of cool, decided to fix this problem.

While the formal tools of Asimov’s Psychohistory were beyond our reach, there were some basic rules of human behaviour we could use in our social re-engineering project. The rule which best fit our situation, was the concept of the swinging pendulum. The notion that popular opinion/behaviour swings from one extreme to the other. The ‘trick’ is to identify the extreme ’states’ and then apply just enough ‘force’ to nudge the system into one of these ’states’.

We ran for student council on the platform that student councils were a tool of the administration to distract our attention from the real problems of poor education, over-crowding etc. etc. If WE were elected we would abdicate our responsibility, we would shut down the council, we would do nothing for the following year, and we would ban all future student councils… Anarchy would Rule!

The administration hated us… therefore the students loved us. We geeks won by a landslide. We abandoned the student council. Phase I of our project was complete. Now we waited.

Winning this election was an accomplishment of sorts. We had no prior status or influence within the student body, yet we beat much more popular and influential jocks, cheerleaders and divas. Rule #1? It’s easy to get elected if that is your ONLY goal… Just promise the people whatever they want. Some of our politicians are very good at this.

Throughout our elected year, we threw not a single party, flew no banners, we raised no funds. The first 2-3 months everything was ‘fine’. Then slowly but surely, discontent festered in the land. The value of a student council grew conspicuous by its absence. It grew in importance, because it didn’t exist. Phase II of our project was well on the way to completion.

That was our final year before we scattered to our universities, but we kept an eye on our little experiment to see if it would develop as we expected.

It did.

At the end of our last year, the students demanded a student council election. We knew someone, would step into the breach at the appropriate time. A full council was elected. The next year our school experienced a huge increase in student involvement. Parties, event attendance, fund raising all reached historical highs. The Pendulum had swung from abject apathy to total commitment. Phase III complete. Mission accomplished. Apathy defeated. Hari Seldom would have been proud.

Were there unintended consequences to our little experiment? Two of them come to mind.

Fact: The individual who became student council president… went on to become a Member of the Canadian Parliament.

Fact: I now speak for a living. My topic? Change Management.

If you’re looking for “The Room that Eats Speakers” you’ll find it just below this article.

The article I posted yesterday was warmly received by almost a thousand meeting planners, so I thought it worthwhile to continue the theme for a day or two - here’s an article specifically for past, present and potential meeting planner clients.

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1) Content first: Decide who you want to speak for your conference based on the value of their message and their ability to enthral your audience, not on their reported ‘fee’.

Once you’ve decided who you want as your keynoters, then negotiate with them.

Negotiation Lesson 101:
Make at least one counter-offer to anything that anyone proposes.
Negotiation Lesson 102:
If what they are asking is way above your budget, then come clean…
tell them your budget. Don’t be ashamed of it, just let them know it
your budget will NOT insult them.

Remember, fees are not cast in stone (regardless of what anyone says), stealing an idea from Pirate pop culture “they aren’t ‘rules’ they’re more like ‘guidelines’”. Believe it or not, speakers value more than just money, but at the same time remember that ‘exposure’ is not always a selling point. People can die from exposure.

2) The Clock is Ticking: Stick to the schedule. You’ve paid the speaker mega-bucks to speak for you for an allotted time. If you want them to do the best possible job for you, give them the time you promised them.

Professional speakers will never make your job more difficult than it already is: They will never never never speak past their allotted time. Please, please, please do the same for them. Protect the time you gave them, to do their best for you they need that time. (Although they’ll do their best with whatever time you actually give them.)

Yes, you guessed correctly! There’s some personal history here. What do you do, when you travel to the other side of the world and the 90 minute keynote is ‘trimmed back’ to 20 minutes because of avoidable delays? You do your best - knowing that they got far less than they paid for.

3) Listen to your Audience: Hand out speaker evaluation forms, read them, and pay attention to what they have to tell you. Feedback is gold, never miss the opportunity to bend down and pick it up.

4) Hug (=Squeeze!) your Speaker: Within reason, extract everything you can from your professional speakers.

a. Are they willing to meet with your breakout session speakers the night before
and offer some speaking hints and tips from the professional?
b. Are they willing to do an executive breakfast/dinner session with key members?
Board members? Student members?
c. While they’re with you, could you get them to give an additional presentation
for the local board of trade?
d. Will they do media interviews before the conference?
e. Will they provide a follow-on article for your newsletter? Web site?
f. Will they contribute books and materials for draws?
g. Will they do a book signing in the exhibit hall? At one of the vendor booths?

Not all of the above will be possible, not all of it will be for free, but a speaker who wants to create a long term relationship with your association will be more than willing to do one or two or three of the above. It costs nothing to ask.

5) Dark Speaker Secret: Even though I speak for a living… here’s a dark secret. Speakers - regardless of their fee, content or style - do not make your meeting a success; they merely add an experience for your people to discuss. Make sure you include enough networking time in your conference. Running from speaker to speaker is not a conference, it’s a marathon.

6) Google is your friend: When anyone gives you client references, they offer you the names of clients who are certain to provide good feedback; this is not a secret, it’s obvious. So… get onto the Internet, Google the speaker. Speak to some folks they haven’t provided as references.

7) Lucky Number Seven: And finally? If a speaker has done a great job for you? Write them a knock your socks off letter of thanks/reference, and spread the word to your peers on how they helped make your meeting a success.

Speaking should be a win/win/win proposition. A win for the meeting planner, a win for the audience, and finally — a win for the speaker.

I wish you all the best on your next meeting.

Here’s a Catch-22 that affects all of us, we learn best from failure, but the last thing we want to discuss are our failures. In the spirit of sharing, I’m going to discuss some personal professional ‘failures’.

Some background, not as any sort of self promotion, but in an effort to position the context of this article. I’m a keynote speaker. I’ve spoken for more than a quarter of a century and have a reputation sufficient to take me to 37 countries and have me invited to speak at the prestigious World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. In short, I know what I’m doing, I do it well, I’m a bona fide professional.

That doesn’t mean I haven’t failed to deliver from time to time. Not often. Three times to be exact, in more than 25 years.

The first time it happened I wrote it off as ‘the fault of the audience’ … what can I say? It was early in my career and didn’t realize that it’s never the fault of the audience.

The second time? It was a presentation I was giving for the first time… I wrote that failure off to not having the timing down, and suspected that the flow of my talk wasn’t perfect. Better than my first excuse, but as we shall see, not the real reason.

The third time? I knew it wasn’t the audience. I’d grown out of blaming others for the quality of my work. Nor was it a new talk, it was one I’d given hundreds of times, and I’d presented it as I always had, but despite my knowledge of the topic, my passion and delivery – the presentation fell flat, and I died on stage for the third time. If it wasn’t the audience, and if it wasn’t ‘me’ – then why did I fail? As a speaker – that’s an important question. The answer is an important one for any meeting planner.

Each time I failed, I had the same sense of never once connecting with the audience. With that as the only thing in common that I could easily remember - I sat down, took pen and paper and wrote down everything I could reconstruct from my memory about those painful experiences. The result is this little bit of sharing.

Cavernous rooms – Exhibit halls are not the best rooms to speak in. The 50ft ceilings swallow all but the best sound systems. They place a great distance between the speaker and the listeners.

Elevated podiums – When the podium is 3ft or more off the ground? Then you’re guaranteed to be far away from the audience, not only with respect to distance, but psychologically as well. Here’s a made up formulae to consider, the difficulty of creating rapport with your audience, increases as the square of the distance between you and the listener. I’ve nothing but my experiential data to back that up.

Open space in front of podium – A tall podium usually causes the first row of seats to be 20-30 ft from the podium… They have to be that far back or they’ll get a crick in their neck looking up to you! This adds more space between the speaker and the audience. At one of my failures, there was literally enough space for a pipe band between myself and the audience. I remember them well as they marched out and I marched up to my guillotine.

A wide centre aisle – if the room is large, the temptation is for a wide central aisle – meaning that if the speaker stands in the centre of the podium, then he/she is speaking to blank space all the way to the back of the room!

Wide rooms vs. deep rooms – some rooms are wider than they’re deep. This means that listeners to the left and right of the speaker are further away than those all the way at the back of the room. For a speaker to make eye contact with those on the left, requires that we turn our back to those to the right. AND if we’re wearing a lavalier microphone? Then you MUST turn your shoulders in the direction you’re speaking OR the mic won’t pick up your voice.

Rounds vs. Rows – If a room is filled with round tables rather than rows of seats, then 300 people or more are scattered over a few acres… being spoken to by a tiny speaker far away in the distance? Eye contact? You’re lucky if you can see the speaker… sooo… the meeting planner solves the ‘problem’ by…

Cameras and large screens – and in doing so they deliver the final death blow to the valiant speaker. In order that the audience can see the speaker, they’ll bring on the camera… which requires lighting… which ensures the speaker will never even see the auidience through the glare of the lights.

Now, I’m well aware that large audiences forces some of the above onto the meeting, but when they ALL converge at a single meeting then the risk of failure is high. As I thought back to each of my three failures? All of the above were in play, I was doomed from the start.

As I’ve grown older, and spoken more, I’ve grown wiser. This week I was presented with the room that eats speakers. But! I now recognized the beast. I was able to make some changes - both in the room layout (minor changes) and in my presentation (more minor changes)… I’m told the meeting was a roaring success. I’d beaten the monster. It didn’t eat me this time.

The key? Know that certain rooms pose more of a challenge. If possible? Change the room, if not? Then be aware of the room, know the threats, embrace them and respond to them. (But change something in the room… the room layout is not fixed in stone.)

The IT industry is afflicted with a brain eating virus for which there is no known cure. The medical term for this highly contagious disease is Argotism. The incubation period of the disease ranges from one to eight hours, at which time the subject becomes highly, and permanently, contagious.

The primary symptom of this incurable malady is the ability to speak for hours at a time without uttering a single comprehensible sentence. A secondary symptom is the uncontrollable desire to display incredibly complex visuals using the most sophisticated technology available.

At first it was thought these visual manifestations of the disease, were failed attempts by the patient to overcome the impaired ability to speak plain English. However, extensive content analysis of more than 10,000 visuals has uncovered no evidence to support this hypothesis.

While medical experts admit to similarities between Argotism and certain aspects of Tourette syndrome - in particular the uttering of coprolalia - they have, as yet, found no biological connection between these two conditions.

Scientists are baffled by the contagion vector. The primary methods of disease contagion are typically inhalation, ingestion and physical contact. Argotism ignores these vectors and is instead, spread through the auditory and visual systems. The World Health Organization (WHO) headquartered in Atlanta, GA admits that this method of infection will lead to a global pandemic unless a cure, or at least a vaccine, is found.

Early onset of the disease is identified by a subject’s inability to raise a hand above their head and voice the words “I don’t understand what you’re talking about. Could you please explain it to me?”

In the advanced stage of the disease, subjects repeat the phrases which first infected them, but which they still don’t clearly understand.

(In the interests of not spreading the disease further, this author does not wish to represent any of the “active” phrases in this article. Luckily there is one phrase which has lost most of its ability to infect, which will serve as an example of the virus. Please read it carefully and if you sense the urge to use it in conversation in the next 24 hours, please report immediately to your nearest medical facility. The phrase is “Web 2.0″.)

While it is possible to become infected after a single exposure to Argotism, it usually takes repeated exposure before the subject demonstrates full blown Argotism and becomes a carrier.

A recent WHO study found that being in the presence of a superior when first exposed to Argotism, greatly increased the risk of infection. This increase in the risk factor is assumed, though not yet verified, to stem from our natural reluctance to admit ignorance to management.

While there is no known cure for the disease, there is evidence to suggest that those already infected with Curmudgeonism, or those equipped with a technological advance known as a “BS Detector” (origin unknown), are highly resistant to all known strains of the Argot virus.

An additional finding which has researchers puzzled, is that all the inhabitants of, and everyone from, the state of Missouri are immune to the disease. While stumped by this finding, researchers do believe this anomaly could eventually lead to a cure for Argotism. The researchers are currently herding thousands of Missourians into medical facilities for extensive testing.

Citizens are warned the most likely places to contract Argotism are technology conferences. The most virulent strains of this disease are usually found in the keynote presentations. Members are urged, if they must attend these breeding grounds of pestilence, to bring blindfolds and earplugs to reduce the chance of infection.

There is another home remedy proving useful in isolated cases. Prepare a small tape recorder loaded with the sentence, “I’m sorry, I don’t understand what you just said. Could you explain what you meant by that?” When a presentation drops into incomprehensibility, you know the presenter is falling into an acute attack of Argotism and is entering their most contagious stage.  Before you lose consciousness, press the PLAY button on the recorder and hopefully this will jolt the presenter back into a temporary state of comprehensibility, perhaps long enough for you to escape into the hall.

© 2003, Peter de Jager – Peter is an inoculated Keynote speaker and Management consultant, contact him at pdejager@technobility.com - This article first appeared in Computer World Canada 2003. Sadly - as of this posting, no progress has been made in the search for a cure. We are beginning to lose all hope.

In Lewis Carroll’s classic, Through the Looking Glass, the Red Queen admonishes Alice with “in this place it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.” So much for the concept of a self sustaining ‘Status Quo’.

Giuseppe de Lampedusa echoes this same idea in another, seemingly paradoxical manner, “If things are to remain the same, things will have to Change.”

All of this is true, there really is no argument. The status quo is a myth. The best we can do is identify what aspects of our organization we value today, and do our best to ensure that these attributes exist in our organizations tomorrow.

However, just because we have come to the inescapable conclusion that Change is necessary, does not mean that all possible Change is mandatory.

This is the great trap for those who embrace the idea that we must Change or Die. Unless we find some way to distinguish from good and bad Change, we are compelled to Change when faced with any and every innovation. In the already quoted Through the Looking Glass, there is sad character who has taken the Red Queen’s advice too literally, let me introduce you to the White Knight.

He’s an interesting fellow this White Knight. He believes in embracing anything that’s new. His mistake is to believe that all Change is mandatory. His sturdy horse is festooned with gadgets. There’s a little box in which he keeps his sandwiches, but it’s turned upside down, “so that the rain can’t get in” he says proudly. Until Alice points out that the sandwiches have fallen out, he was totally unaware of this flaw.

He’s also attached a beehive to the horse in the hope that bees will take up house and provide honey, not realizing that bees would never set up house on a moving horse. And then there’s the mousetrap he’s strapped on the horse’s back to keep the mice away, and anklets on his horse’s feet to keep away the sharks.

Yes we must Change, otherwise our organizations fall so far behind the competition, our constituency and clients, that we lose effectiveness and fade into obsolescence. On the other hand, to embrace every Change is the path to chaos.

Our problem, despite the many dinosaurs lumbering in the tar pits of yesterday, is not the lack of recognition that Change is necessary. It is that there is far too much Change to choose from, we suffer from too much choice and a scarcity of good decisions.

Organizations must become adept at three seemingly contradictory skills. We must become brilliantly effective at resisting bad Change, equally effective at embracing good Change and wise enough to decide between these two alternatives.

In case you missed my outrageous statement, I’ll repeat it in its pure form.

Organizations must become brilliantly effective at resisting Change.

Despite the Red Queen Principle, we should not and must not, for the sake of our organizations, embrace all the Change placed before us. Instead we must select the best Change from the panorama of Change facing us.

How do we do that?

The first step is to identify, as clearly as possible, why we’re here. What exactly is the role of our organization, and what must we do to continue fulfilling that role? We can give this a variety of labels, from “Statement of Purpose” to “Vision Statement” to “Services Offered”. It doesn’t really matter what we call this as long as it becomes something we believe in, and against which we can measure all proposed Changes.

This is the idea snuggled inside Lampedusa’s quote…

“If things(1) are to remain the same, things(2) will have to Change.”

things(1) – Refers to that which we do, which is important to our mandate.
These are the things which are of value to us, our constituents, and our superiors.

things(2) – Refers to all the other stuff that surrounds us, stuff we might become
attached to, but which in the final analysis, contributes little to the fulfillment of our mandate.

Therein is the key. Does a proposed Change reinforce, support and/or extend a previously established organizational objective? If it doesn’t, then enthusiastic acceptance, Red Queen Principle notwithstanding, is incorrect, improper and ill-advised. To paraphrase Lampedusa, to embrace the things we value, we must jettison what we don’t.

These are the first two steps. Identify what is valuable to us, and then measure every proposed Change against these core values.

The next step, is to determine how the proposed Change will fit into the context of our organization. In other words, what must Change in order to accommodate the new Change? If you’ve made it this far, then you are well into the first stages of implementing the Change.

At this point you know why the Change is necessary. i.e. what core values is it designed to protect, support or extend. This knowledge, properly communicated, will go a long way to reducing resistance to the proposed Change, especially if you are willing to make all the information which went into your decision public. Nothing is more effective at reducing resistance to Change than full disclosure… except perhaps being involved in the actual decision making process itself.

You now also have some idea what impact it will have on your organization. ie. What other things will have to Change to accommodate this Change. With all of this in hand, changing should not be too difficult.

The issue of Change is tricky. On one hand you cannot avoid all Change; on the other hand, you cannot embrace all Change. Which means we must resist the bad, embrace the good and know the difference.

Good luck.

Predict vb: To declare in advance

“Can we predict the Future?” In many ways that’s a loaded question (it’s also redundant since we don’t ‘predict’ the present or the past). There’s an implicit assumption that the question means “Predict accurately”, and when we make that assumption explicit, most people answer that predicting the future is impossible. That’s where the “paradox” starts to creep in.

We make predictions all the time, from the incredibly mundane “If I throw this coin up into the air, it will fall back to the ground”, to the more interesting “If we build a Dam ‘here’, water levels will rise ‘there’, and within five years, the economy will improve around this region.” - (and we’ll force animals, people included, to relocate… )

The coin falling example is so incredibly boring, most people won’t even allow us to call it a real ‘prediction.’ They’ll respond with “Of course it will fall to the ground! You’re not ‘predicting’ anything; you’re merely stating the obvious!”

At the other end of the spectrum, if we flip a coin and we dare to categorically declare the result, heads or tails, in advance… then we’re told that’s impossible to predict…

Between stating the obvious, and voicing the impossible, there’s an interesting category of predictions. Let’s approach them from the perspective of how impressive an accurate prediction appears to the reader.

Consider the following thought experiment. With some solid knowledge of how to calculate eclipses, travel back in time a bit more than 2,000 years and use your knowledge to ‘predict’ an upcoming Solar Eclipse. Chances are you will be either killed or raised up as some sort of Wizard/Sorcerer - or worse… a God. Good luck in any case. I doubt Godhood is all it’s made out to be. There are reportedly far too many people asking for mutually exclusive and contradictory favours.

Now come back to today and calculate the next Solar eclipse… the response is a general ‘Ho-Hum’… it’s not that the reader will necessarily know how to perform the calculations, but they’ll know that such things are readily doable and/or accessible.

From one situation to the other, your prediction first generated general wonderment to then sheer boredom. The only variable was the audience’s knowledge of eclipse calculations.

In other words, a prediction is only impressive if the audience doesn’t know how you came to that conclusion. This is the same concept underlying every stage magician’s act. Come to think of it, it’s almost a corollary to Clarke’s Law “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

Why do we make predictions? To impress, or to inform?

If we make them to impress people, then we must recognize that the degree to which an accurate (or reasonably so) prediction makes an impression is directly proportional to the amount of disbelief it engenders when they first hear it.

The question arises, what is the use of a highly accurate prediction… if nobody believes it in advance of the event? If you did ‘predict’ Sept/11 or the failure of the Levees, but nobody believed you, what good did you achieve?

If on the other hand we make predictions in order to inform the listener, perhaps in order to change behaviour, then the less the prediction looks like a rabbit pulled out of a hat, the better.

Here’s the paradox in full bloom, if you could have predicted Sept/11 and got everyone to believe it in advance, then it would not have been seen as a prediction… it would have been perceived as a statement of the obvious.

In other words, the best soothsayers make predictions which sound obvious, sometimes to the degree that neither the prediction nor the predictor registers on the listener’s consciousness as something extraordinary.

Once more with feeling? We’ll believe anything, if we also believe we thought of it first… and give no credit to the one who convinced us it was our idea.

While there are other ways to define the role of a Change Agent (CA), the CA’s most commonly assigned and practiced mandate is to bring about a pre-determined Change within a community. A CA is typically assigned the task, “Make this happen!” and it is their responsibility to force/cajole/steer/entice/motivate etc. etc. the community to move towards a specific destination. The CA fails in their task if ‘this’ doesn’t happen exactly as envisioned by those who assigned them to their role of CA. In the real world, the CA typically does not have a lot of wiggle room in their assignment.Regardless of the specific task assigned to a CA, all CAs, without exception, must function within the context of how people respond to Change in general. It is this fact (obvious observation?) which spawns the Change Agent’s unavoidable handicap.

How do people respond to “Change in General”? The most honest and accurate answer is that we don’t, or rather we can’t, respond to Change “in general”. We can, and do, respond to specific Changes. We evaluate each Change according to its individual degree of necessity and then, and only then, respond accordingly.

This observation doesn’t stop us from making generalized statements about Change, here’s one, “The only constant is Change”. While this is cutely true (if I’d meant ‘acutely’ I’d have typed it) and ancient in origin, a more useful and more recent observation is that “People don’t resist Change, they resist being changed.”

If presented with the statement uttered by a CA, “I’m here to Change how you do things.” no rational person will gleefully respond “Okay! Do what you have to do!” Instead we immediately try to get specific and respond (retaliate?) with a simple question, “Why should we change?” This in turn, is immediately tagged as resistance, and even as a mild form of insubordination.

If the statement, “People resist Change” is true, then it is true in the same sense that Newton’s 1st law of Motion, The Law of Inertia is true.

Newton’s First Law of Motion:
The Law of Inertia.

An object at rest tends to stay at rest,
and an object in motion tends to stay
in motion with the same speed and
in the same direction unless acted
upon by an unbalanced force.

Like a stone unconsciously (literally) following Newton’s Law, we continue doing what we’re doing, until we’re presented with a reason to do something else.

When we ask “Why should we Change”, we’re not trying to annoy or frustrate anyone, we’re merely following a fundamental law of the universe. We’re just seeking the reason necessary to do something different from what we’re already doing.

The CA’s handicap is not only that they’re here to Change us, for reasons as yet unexplained, but they’re here to Change us regardless of how we feel about it. Remember, the task of the CA is to “Make this Happen” if they don’t, they fail.

So, the CA must Change us, otherwise they fail. This flies in the face of how we decide whether or not a Change is necessary. Even worse, it ignores our earlier observation, “People don’t resist Change, they resist being changed.”

Allow me to introduce you to Bill, he’s a Change Agent, he’s here to Change you.

When a Change Agent is appointed, the decision to Change is fait accompli. Nothing anyone has to say has any bearing on the matter.

There’s an alternative approach to this problem, even if there’s no generally accepted term for the role. Perhaps the term, “Change Coordinator” would work better? It suggests that at worst the person is assigned the task of coordinating the efforts, decisions and the Changes of others, rather than inflicting them with a predetermined Change?

Our desire for Change arises either from the need to respond to a threat, “We must do something about this!”, where “this” is a visible problem, or a perception that there is a better way of doing things, “We could do this in order to achieve a specific additional benefit!”.

The term “Change Agent” has accumulated far too much negative baggage, and isn’t conducive to the notion that real Change is not mandated, but instead grows out of a common understanding that it is necessary, for specific reasons, to respond to a growing threat, or to seize upon a potential future opportunity.

You can see (and order) a better version of this 20×30 poster here

I’ve become a bit of a GPS addict. I now have maps for both all of North America and the UK and Ireland. I can’t imagine driving to someplace new, without the assistance of strange unseen satellites.

Despite the benefits, there is a peculiar downside to these navigation units. With a map, you always have some sense of where you are, with Mapquest type instructions, you have some sense of where you’re going… but with a GPS? You only have a moment to moment sense of where you go next. If (when… I have a story to tell the next time we meet in a pub) the device breaks down, you are completely, totally – almost permanently – lost.

Benefits and disadvantages aside, there are a few things we can learn about project management from the lowly GPS.

Patience
This is the very first ‘strange’ thing that I noticed when I first used the GPS. When you make a mistake and go ‘off route’ (or off plan if we’re replating this to PM), no matter how many times you make that mistake, the voice giving you directions remains calm, cool and unfluttered.

“Well of course it does!”, Someone mutters from the back of the room… “It’s a machine!”, and my response is, yes I know that, but when I make a mistake I’ve come to expect that the response will communicate someone’s displeasure. And, that expectation of a negative response to a mistake is the primary reason why status reporting is so difficult. We’re afraid of the negative response so we ‘shade the truth’ to make ourselves look better.

Constant Monitoring
I would not suggest for a moment, that your project is monitored as closely as GPS monitors your location, but the lesson is plain. Knowing where you are, is crucial to getting to where you need to be according to your plan.

Regardless of the effort it takes to where we are against the plan, it’s something we have to do. If it’s not done, then we’re not managing the project. I’m not sure what we think we’re doing, but whatever it is, it isn’t project management.

Track the project isn’t administrivia is the heart of the PM concept. To state it even more plainly; everything done in the name of PM, is done to make it possible to know where we are. To do all the difficult preliminary work and then not track our progress is a form of insanity.

Not allowing time in the plan to track and report progress against the plan, is to state publicly that our planning activities are a farce… something we do to merely ‘look’ like professionals. The solution is obvious; learn what we can from the GPS

Retracing vs. RePlanning
When you go off route with a GPS, it will, for a period of time, do nothing more than try to get you back on the original route. It’s do this, until you get so far off the correct path, that it’s better to replan the trip.

That’s a great PM lesson. If we’re off the plan, how long do we just try to get back on the original plan… before we sit do and replan the project? Frankly, not enough replanning is done, in it’s place there’s a lot of wishful thinking – we’ll catch up on the weekend.

Macro vs. Detail views
If you’re paying close attention to the GPS, and that’s what we usually do, you’ll notice that when the next ‘check point’ is far away, then it zooms out to an overview, but when the next turn is just a little bit ahead, the instructions happen faster, the map zooms closer, proving you more detail of what’s ahead.

Project management can emulate that approach. Having a project status report ‘every three’ months works reasonably well when the work between markers is much of the same… but when key deliverables arrive more rapidly, when they get bunched up on the Gantt Chart, then more frequent status updates are advised.

While this is a tongue in cheek comparison, there’s some truth here. Driving from Dublin to Sligo has much in common with a project where both the starting date and deliverables are known. One difference? There are more Pubs on the road to Sligo.