PM Blog: Kimberly Wiefling

Suppressing Your Feminine Side May Be Bad for Business

2010-07-07T09:33:30-07:00

Another noggin' floggin' by Kimberly M. Wiefling, M.S.

About 15 years ago a woman I barely knew, the wife of a coworker, was listening to me describe the challenges I faced as a project manager at Hewlett Packard. "You're not using your feminine power!" she suddenly pronounced, as if she'd just discovered the cause of some mysterious chronic illness I'd been suffering from for a lifetime. My first reaction was, "Use my feminine power? I sure hope not!" Since I was obviously perplexed, she further explained that this included nurturing behaviors like bringing food and drinks to meetings, and expressing other characteristics that I've heard described as "soft skills" by HR pros. I figured I'd missed that in the job description.

You see, I was working in high-tech, and for over a decade I'd painstakingly stamped out any semblance of femininity in my work. After earning a Master's degree in physics, a field in which women are almost as scarce as on-time schedules, I'd entered the high-tech engineering world, a profession with an equally abysmal track record of attracting women. Why on earth would I want to associate myself—in any way—with anything female in my work? I was sure I would appear weak and ineffective to my colleagues, and quite possibly my salary would decrease.

Maybe I was being a little paranoid, but until recently, I have done my best to ignore the gender issue in my career. I've steered clear of "radical feminism," and I most certainly didn't want to be perceived as "nurturing." However, this past year I've been working on a book project, Scrappy Women in Business, which prompted me to reflect on the role of women in the workplace, and my own experience as a female in a predominantly male work environment. As a result of this, and the changing nature of the work environment, I've come to value what my colleague's wife called my "feminine power." But my initial hesitation wasn't completely unfounded, given the research on women in the workplace.

Even If I'm Not Nurturing, Chances Are People Will Think I Am

It turns out that it might not matter whether I am nurturing or not—being a woman, it's likely that I will be perceived as nurturing by CEOs and other top executives. Catalyst, the leading global nonprofit dedicated to expanding opportunities for women in business, published a study in 2005 under the intriguing title Women "Take Care," Men "Take Charge:" Stereotyping of U.S. Business Leaders Exposed. Their research demonstrated that, although women and men often lead in similar ways, they are perceived very differently by both male and female senior executives. Regardless of the reality, women are perceived to be better at supporting and rewarding while men are perceived to be better at delegating and influencing upward.

Unfortunately, these unconscious biases impact the perception of competence and fitness for promotion, though with the growing emphasis on teamwork and collaboration these days, I'm not sure in which direction. We can, however, measure the results by observing the difference in participation of women and men at various levels in the professional world, and in the relative compensation of women and men.

Just Because You're Paranoid Doesn't Mean People Aren't Out to Get You

Back in the 1970's women represented only 10% of the musicians in an orchestra. That number has risen over the years to over 35%, and a Princeton University study in 2000 found that a big chunk of that gain was due to the switch to blind auditions. When the decision-makers can't see whether the musician is a women or a man, more women are hired. A study by The Anita Borg Institute on the recruitment, retention, and advancement of technical women found that women are sometimes preferentially eliminated during the resume review process, even if the interview process is unbiased. Another study specifically comparing evaluations of resumes by randomly assigning a woman's name found that resumes bearing a woman's name were rated lower by both women and men. (Perhaps women should use initials instead of first names on resumes, or hiring managers should have the names masked before reviewing them.)

Of course we're all biased in many ways. All human beings are. Our assumptions and beliefs unconsciously influence our decisions, and our brains are clever enough to keep this process hidden from us so that we think we are making rational decisions based on the facts. Don't think you're biased? You can find out in about 15 minutes. Harvard University's "Project Implicit®" provides a test in exchange for using your data in their studies. You will be randomly assigned one of a variety of bias studies, but you can repeat the process to experience them all. Based on experimenting with this several years ago, I found that I have a slight tendency to associate technical topics with women. Go figure!

According to US Department of Labor statistics, only 10% of employed engineers were women at the turn of the century (2001). And while the salary differential in engineering has largely disappeared, the employment differential remains large in all but the life sciences. Even project management remains a profession with some degree of gender disparity, in both employment and pay. The 2010 PMI Salary Survey suggests that only 40% of US project managers are women (based on survey respondents), and that the salaries of women project managers are "considerably lower" than that typical for men (about 10%). Karen Klein's 2005 article "It's a Women's World, Too" does make the point that women are entering the project management profession at rates around double that of men, but still acknowledges that female project managers face barriers to success that are peculiar to women, such as excessive humility and a tendency towards self-criticism.

The Road to the Top Winds Uphill All the Way

In spite of the possible risk, and because I'm past typical childbearing age (something executives admit is a real barrier for women in hiring and promotion in off-the-record true confessions), I'm less inclined to eschew my feminine qualities in my work these days. I've found that these qualities have become increasingly valued for their importance in delivering extraordinary business results. The incredible diversity of teams, increased focus on alliances and partnerships, the growth of open innovation, crowd-sourcing, and collaboration on a massive scale (facilitated by the internet), have all made people keenly aware of the power of group genius and the importance of a more collaborative style of leadership. I've noticed that the work I do as a project manager increasingly involves facilitating interaction rather than giving direction; perhaps it was always about that and I just didn't notice because I was suppressing my nurturing side.

It turns out that female versions of leadership improve bottom line business results. In a 2004 Catalyst study, companies with a higher proportion of women on their top management teams enjoyed a 35% greater ROE (Return on Equity) than those with the lowest. Although I'm wary of the trap of stereotypes, in the past couple of years I began to wonder if maybe women and men really do lead in some fundamentally different way. And, with more profit at stake, I hope it's something that can be learned by anyone, even nurturing-averse me.

There are plenty of pop psychology discussions about gender differences, including the somewhat unimaginatively titled "Are Women Better Project Managers Than Men" on the Toolbox for IT Project and Program Management Blog. Puh-LEESE! This kind of conversation is similar to my Japanese friends asking me to describe Americans. "Which one?" I ask. Like all simplistic questions, the answer to whether men or women are better project managers is, "It depends." It depends on which woman, or which man, and which project, and in which situation. While statistics can help us understand trends in the aggregate, it's foolish to apply that data to any specific individual or situation. Those who carelessly apply averages to individuals do both parties an injustice. Let's not deepen the gender divide by participating in these kinds of debates. Instead, let's look at facts.

Is there gender bias at work in project management, and the business world in general? In my project leadership role I make it a practice to focus on the results produced, not the intentions of my team. Customers care about results, not intentions. I think the same approach may work well in this situation. I have no real way of knowing whether there is bias in the process, but I do know that there is a difference in the outcome—the participation and compensation of women relative to men. The measurable data from Catalyst certainly demonstrate a disparity:

Percentage of women in the U.S. labor force: 46.3%
Percentage of women in management, professional and related occupations: 50.6%
Percentage of female Fortune 500 corporate officers: 15.4%
Percentage of female Fortune 500 board seats: 14.8%
Percentage of female Fortune 500 top earners: 6.7%
Percentage of female Fortune 500 CEOs: 2.4%

Of course, root cause analysis is important, but the root cause of being overweight has been well known for years and still I can't lose 5 kilograms. I personally don't care whether the remaining disparities between women and men in project management—and the business world in general—are a result of accident, unconscious bias, or a devious plot. The causes no longer interest me. Making and measuring progress does. What's measured tends to get attention, and frequently improves.

The Coming Shortfall in Working Age Population in the Developed World

Based on a report by the Stanford Center on Longevity, (PDF) it looks to me like it's in all of our best interests to make workplaces more attractive to human beings in general, and—in fields where they are under-represented—to women in particular. In a decade or two, the shortage of working-age people will be an economic crisis in some parts of the world. Japan and Germany in particular will face at least a 20 percent shortage in the coming decades. (That's why I don't worry about women's equality in the workplace in Japan—it's coming!) We'll need everyone's participation if businesses are going to successfully meet the challenges facing humanity.

The Anita Borg Institute found that technical women leave their companies in mid-career at twice the rate of men. (Read more about this and the reasons why in this PDF if you like.) Companies are losing women, especially at the mid-career stage. Catalyst reported that women cite four major reasons why companies lose female talent: "lack of flexibility (51%); glass ceiling issues (29%); unhappiness with work environment (28%); and feeling unchallenged in their jobs (22%). Only 5% report being downsized and only 3% say they were victims of sexual harassment."

Of course, the workplace isn't all that hospitable to men either. A 2007 Gallup Institute study on wellbeing concluded that 77% of all workers hate their jobs. HATE! Wow. That's much worse than being unhappy with the work environment or feeling unchallenged in a job. I'm no expert at organizational development or the link between worker satisfaction and profit, but I'm guessing this is NOT good for project success or bottom line profits. A little more nurturing probably wouldn't hurt any of us, or our chances for project success either.

If Being More Nurturing Will Increase Project Success, Bring on the Nurturing!

I was educated as a scientist, and if I were just looking at past data I'd conclude that expressing my so-called feminine side in the high-tech business world would put me at a bit of a disadvantage. But that's kind of like driving while only gazing into the rearview mirror. With almost everyone hating their jobs, increased emphasis on collaboration, and the coming shortfall in skilled workers, I'm thinking that a more nurturing work environment is going to be a competitive advantage.

In fact, I've been experimenting with a more nurturing approach in my work in Japan, and it's yielding excellent results: noticeably improved performance in various individuals, faster response to my requests, and more enjoyable working relationships. It's working so well that I'm tempted to try it out on this continent. My only concern is whether it's possible to be both scrappy and nurturing at the same time. Considering the potential 35% higher ROE, I'll have to give it a go purely for financial reasons.

Nurturingly yours,

– Kimberly

P.S. Scrappy Women in Business – Living Proof that Bending the Rules Isn't Breaking the Law, will be available in July 2010. This book, and the associated website invite women to draw inspiration from each other's stories. It's just a small drop in the bucket, but it is one drop.

Overcoming "Last Century" Thinking: Powerful Metaphors for What Happens in the Real World

2010-04-27T13:12:34-07:00

Another noggin' floggin' by Kimberly M. Wiefling, M.S.

As a kid, when I first studied how the world worked I learned that light was a wave, atoms were made of particles called protons, neutrons and electrons, and you could take apart a clock to figure out how it worked. But as my education progressed, I learned that the world was a bit more complicated than the simple models I'd been taught. Light wasn't really a wave, at least not all the time. Protons, neutrons and electrons weren't exactly billiard ball-like particles. And while you can figure out how a clock works by examining its guts, the same isn't true of a flock of birds. Over the past decade I've read three books that have further broadened—or warped, depending on your perspective—my mental models about how the world (including a project) operates:

Chaos: Making a New Science, by James Gleick
Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos, by M.Mitchell Waldrop
A New Kind of Science, Stephen Wolfram's enormous tome (1200 pages, which I scanned more than read)

Chaos helped me understand how slight variations in the starting point (what geeks call "initial conditions") could result in huge differences in the outcome, the famous Butterfly Effect.

Complexity opened my mind to self-organizing systems of interdependent entities (called "agents"), and the highly complex results that could emerge quite naturally from the collective behavior of simple agents (for example, complex structures built by simple termites). A representation of complex adaptive systems, from Wikipedia Commons

A New Kind of Science helped me realize that even vastly complicated phenomenon in nature could be recreated by a very simple set of rules applied recursively, and got me thinking that seemingly complex happenings around me (like the unfolding of a project) might be produced by some relatively uncomplicated underlying principles.

As a result of these mind-bending experiences—a natural extension of my education as a physicist—I stopped thinking about the world as a machine which could be dissected into its component parts, and started appreciating "wholeness" and the nonlinear, highly interdependent nature of the world in which we live. This change in my thinking hasn't made me a better bowler or saved me money on my taxes, but it does help me attack problems that seem impossible and make progress on them, as I no longer expect to see a direct connection between my actions and the end result.

Because I encounter a lot of people who operate as if the world behaves in a linear way, my perspective sometimes gets me into trouble. I was recently asked how a particular exercise in a project leadership workshop contributed to achieving the workshop goals. People are understandably curious, but I was a bit annoyed. What perturbed me was the underlying linear, reductionist thinking that their question revealed, all too common in the business world. Would I really be expected to show a direct cause-and-effect link between everything I did in a workshop and the potential impact it would have on a particular participant's leadership development? It reminded me of the times I'd been asked to justify one or another project risk mitigation expense and how exactly it would shorten the project duration. Thoroughly explaining it would take more time than just doing it.

The sort of thinking embedded in these kinds of questions is at odds with concepts of wholeness, interdependence, complexity, nonlinear behavior, and emergence. This may sound rather like New Age jargon, but it's far better suited to explaining human beings and other natural phenomenon than simplistic views of the world. These ideas provide powerful alternatives to traditional mechanistic models, and I think that they can enable us to be better project leaders. Let's take a look at three interesting concepts that I've found to be powerful metaphors in project leadership and management:

Wholeness vs. reducing things to their component parts
Nonlinear behavior vs. linear relationships between cause and effect
Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS) and emergence vs. command-and-control

Wholeness

In 1773 the famous composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was employed as a court musician by the ruler of Salzburg, Prince-Archbishop Hieronymus Colloredo. Now, can you imagine the prince asking Mozart, "How does this particular note support the beauty of this musical piece?" I rather doubt that the prince, or anyone else for that matter, would actually ask such an inane question! The beauty of a musical composition springs from the overall pattern and interrelationship of the notes. The beauty can't be explained by chopping the music apart like some kind of product breakdown structure exercise. It is a property of the whole. Wholeness, or holism, is the first concept that eludes obsessively last century thinkers.

David Bohm, a famous physicist, challenged traditional thinking in physics with his book Wholeness and the Implicate Order. Bohm had had quite enough of the tendency among physicists to assume that any phenomenon could be understood by reducing it to its component parts, somewhat akin to trying to figure out how birds flock by cutting apart a bird. A hologram is a great example of wholeness. Unlike a photograph, where each part of the photo represents the associated part of the scene, each piece of a hologram contains the entire picture, albeit from a different angle. Asking which piece of a hologram of you and your boyfriend contains your boyfriend makes no sense whatsoever. He is represented throughout the entire hologram from different perspectives. If you break up, you can't cut your boyfriend out of a hologram like you could cut him out of a picture.

Likewise, a project isn't a bunch of beads strung together to make a necklace. Your project plan may like a neat, tidy, linear sequence of tasks in PERT chart or a Gantt chart, but that is just a simple linear model of a highly dynamic, nonlinear, iterative system, and it can only be truly understood as a whole. That's why waterfall techniques don't work very well, and why Agile methodology is all the rage.

A project team isn't the sum of its parts, either. You can have a group of eight individual contributors who work at cross-purposes to produce nothing but conflict, or eight people who work together as an interdependent whole, every part supporting every other part. You can't map every accomplishment to the percent contributions of each team member any more than you can map which part of "beauty" in a musical piece comes from each note. The team as a whole achieves what no single member could achieve alone.

Nonlinearity

If I put twice as much gas in my car I expect to be able to travel roughly twice as far as with the original quantity. Three times the gas should carry me triple the distance. That's an example of a linear relationship. It's easy to predict what will happen to the outcome if I change the input.

As I'm sure you know, projects are nothing like this. Cutting the number of bugs in half doesn't necessarily make the quality twice as good, especially if one of the remaining bugs is a showstopper. And spending an additional hour on planning can save a day of wasted time and effort (up to the point of diminishing returns). Most physical systems are inherently nonlinear, and projects are no exception.

Nonlinear systems can't be described by adding up the parts because their parts interact. A small change in one part of the system can produce huge changes in other parts of the system. The reverse is also true—a large change in some part of the system may have little or no impact on the outcome, like shortening the duration of a task that's not on the critical path. Increasing the number of hours people work doesn't increase their productivity proportionately. In fact, in some cases the opposite occurs: they make more mistakes, resulting in misdirected effort, rework, or both. Adding people to a project can cause it to slow down rather than speed up, and reducing software engineering resources on a team of eight by one person could cause engineering productivity to drop by half if that programmer happens to be the one who can produce seven lines of defect-free uncommented code for every one line of an unskilled novice.

An example that far too many people can relate to, unfortunately, is the process of finding a new job. A great deal of activity may occur with no perceptible progress, and then finally a job offer is received. This is a great example of a non-linear system. All of the effort and time invested produces pretty much nothing, and then suddenly the result—a job—is produced. Projects aren't quite as bad since we can see progress along the way in the form of lines of code written, hardware designed, or tests run, but most project managers have learned long ago that a reported "50% percent complete" doesn't mean halfway to the goal.

Complex Adaptive Systems and Emergence

One of my many networking lunches recently was with someone who's famous in the world of business management theory. He was skeptical when I suggested that groups of people could, and would, self-organize around compelling future visions without hierarchy and a power structure to support attaining the desired result. It sounded to me like he was advocating a command-and-control approach—something that even the military has come to realize is ineffective in complex, rapidly changing environments.

Perhaps he hasn't heard that groups of termites following relatively simple rules are routinely able to build complex termite mounds that look like a castle out of a Disney movie, all without a grand plan or a controlling hierarchy. There is no termite project leader. There is no termite scrum master. There is no termite mound requirements document. It just happens as a result of each termite following a few simple rules and interacting with one another.

Imagine if the members of a project team followed a set of guiding principles out of which would emerge a project result that was aligned with customer expectation and business needs. Could human beings be capable of greater collaborative works than a bunch of termites without some higher-ranking manager bossing them around? I certainly hope so.

What guiding principles would enable project team members to co-create an outcome that would delight customers and turn a tidy profit? How about a customer delight meter strapped to each person's wrist with a needle that jiggled one way or the other with each act, depending on how it would ultimately influence customer delight? Maybe this is a bit too futuristic, so what if each person on the team was intimately familiar with client needs, could judge what would delight a client, and was highly motivated to meet those needs? Or imagine if the impact of each action and decision on the revenue, cost and profit of a company were instantly visible to individuals incentivized to optimize profit and customer delight? The results might be even more fascinating than a termite mound, and the process of achieving these results would be much more inspiring than a work breakdown structure and a task list.

The Lens of Wholeness, Nonlinearity and Emergence

I certainly don't recommend that you hole up in your office reading about chaos, complexity, nonlinear systems and the like, but I do think we all can benefit from looking at the world through a different lens now and then. Life isn't linear. Pushing harder doesn't necessarily make something go faster, and simple guiding principles enacted by each person at every level of an organization are far more effective in achieving results than an unenforceable mandate from on high. Peer through this alternative lens now and then to see what might look different on your project.

Kollaboration Is Killing Me

2009-12-08T09:30:23-08:00

Brace Yourself for the Huge Adoption Hurdle for New Tools and Behaviors

Another noggin' floggin' by Kimberly M. Wiefling, M.S.

Each New Year's Day I choose a theme to guide and inspire me throughout the year, or at least distract me from whatever ills are plaguing the planet (most recently the "doom and gloom" economy). When January 1 rolled around last time, I was still swooning from the aftereffects of reading Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything, Don Tapscott's spellbinding book. As a result, I chose "Wacky for Wikis and Crazy for Collaboration" as my theme for 2009. (If you've read my previous ProjectConnections article on this topic, you'll notice that my views in this article have become slightly more tarnished than last time, based on the past year's experience.)

My 2009 collaboration began with a vengeance! First, I spent over a hundred hours expanding an extensive wiki I'd created for the 25 or so geographically dispersed people who work together on the projects I do with Japanese companies. We're a loose collection of people and scattered between Tokyo and San Francisco, working across organizational boundaries and cultural barriers. Having a place where we could stash info that everyone could easily access seemed like just the thing we needed to take our venture to the next level. Visions of vastly reduced email flow, and the increased ease with which we'd all be able to leverage information from past projects for future similar projects, danced through my head.

Next I contributed heavily to the wiki for a professional association I co-chair, the SDForum Engineering Leadership Special Interest Group. We have a very successful operating model for this all-volunteer organization. Other groups were keen to copy some of our best practices, so I loaded up org charts, diagrams, processes, schedules, potential speaker lists, and meeting minutes to the previously lightly used wiki, so anyone who wanted to could have a look.

And, finally, I continued to contribute enthusiastically to a home wiki I'd started for sharing the status of various home repairs, shopping wish lists and party planning, and urged my housemates to do the same. I was most certainly wacky for wikis and crazy for collaboration!

Alas, after a year of what I'm now calling "the collective consciousness conspiracy experiment," I can honestly say, "Kollaboration is killing me!" If you are struggling to harness the hydra of the group genius in your project team, I'm sure you'll be able to relate to some of what I've experienced with these three wiki experiments. It's just a tad painful, but press on if you're curious.

The Japanese Connection

After sinking hundreds of hours and six months into the Japanese collaboration wiki, I was still having to beg people to make use of it. Here I'd built a treasure chest of information about our business processes, team members and projects—something a new competitor in the market would dearly love to get their hands on—and pretty much the only person reading it was me. The features of this wiki make most corporate intranet sites look shabby by comparison. During meetings, I'd double-dog-dare people to ask me a question, and then see if it could be answered by searching the wiki. Yes! Score! Time and again, I could answer any question by navigating to a wiki page. Among the many treasures, there's a list of all of our projects, detailed information on each, schedules on what's happening, logistics support, relevant industry reference material, and handy tips on travel to client locations and navigating the H1N1 pandemic.

Nevertheless, a good nine months after launching it, I continued to receive queries for information that could easily be found on the wiki. The phrase I most frequently found myself including on my replies to emails regarding the half dozen or so projects we're working on at any given time was, "Thanks for your message and the valuable information. I've added this to our team wiki, where it will be easy to find and access when anyone on our team needs it in the future. Here's the url for the location for your future reference." Over the months I continued to send such messages, while simultaneously any illusions I might have had that other people valued my time vanished. I'd become little more than a secretary, a title even administrative assistants with a shred of self-respect would scorn.

With my patience worn paper thin, around April 1st I sent a light-hearted threat out to the entire community of wiki users (and avoiders) saying that if, in the judgment of the team, the wiki wasn't useful, I'd be irreversibly deleting it at the end of the month. Then a miracle occurred. Of course I wasn't really going to delete the wiki, but . . . this email brought my thinly veiled frustration to the attention of the senior executive sponsoring this little experiment, and she wisely stepped in to make the wiki our official collaboration site. She even assigned a highly competent and enthusiastic person to be the Wiki Lead—more than I could have hoped for! Although not an immediate solution, hope bloomed once again.

The Volunteer Dilemma

Leading a team of volunteers is even trickier than leading paid employees. Their continued commitment and contributions depend on their continued enjoyment of, or at least satisfaction with, the volunteer experience. Although you can suggest, cajole, entice, and beg people to use a volunteer wiki to capture and exchange valuable information that would otherwise be rattling around in a dozen people's email systems, no executive can step in and effectively mandate it. It's true that some people have finally started to use the wiki to stash and share info, but I'm still sending those emails saying, "Thanks, and I put your stuff on the wiki." (With the implied "like you should have in the first place!") On bad days my finger hovers over the "Delete This Damn Wiki" button, but so far I've resisted the urge. Just when I'm about to give up hope, someone will update one of the pages and give me a reason to believe that we might yet get the whole team using this tool as "Communication Central."

There's No Place Like Home on the Wiki

After some early successes in raising the visibility of some long needed home repairs, it turns out that people living in the same house would rather just talk to one another than communicate using a wiki. Go figure. I keep saying, "The faintest font is mightier than the strongest memory," but the home wiki's been dormant for a couple of months now, and no one's elbowing me out of the way to get to the kitchen computer to update the shopping list these days. Maybe they're closet technophobes, but I tend to believe that they honestly do think it's more efficient just to yell to whoever's heading to the store, "Oh, can you pick up some mouse traps while you're out?"

Not So Wacky for Wikis, But Still Committed

As I survey the landscape of my past year's collaboration experiment, I see that there actually are signs of hope among the smoldering remains. The benefits of a shared computer space, where groups of people can collectively create, access, and edit information, are undeniable. There's no better way to get everyone on the same page than by having just one&mash;and only one—that everyone is looking at. The problem is getting them to look at that page! When we're working in the same building we can always call a meeting and force people to look at the same documents together. When we're spread all over tarnation, it's not so easy. Sending an email doesn't guarantee that the email is read, and creating a wiki doesn't guarantee that anyone bothers to visit it. But I'm not giving up, mind you! While it's been challenging to get people to adopt new tools and new ways of doing business, the alternative—returning to a blizzard of disorganized email and overstuffed computer folders—would be like giving up the my iPhone in favor of a landline.

Changing people's behavior is like trying to change your socks while a whole football team holds you down on the ground and tries to put on your shoes. But here are a few lessons I've learned (and continue to learn) that may help you get your team on board if you're determined to be a 21st century web-enabled collaborator.

What Worked Well

Recruit a couple of supportive team members to do an initial "experiment" or "proof of concept." I sought out the two youngest members of our team because they seemed the most tech savvy and the least fearful of change, as well as a dedicated senior co-conspirator who likes me enough to struggle through these occasional adventures with me.
Shake out the bugs in the tool and the process with this inner circle before inviting lots of other people to play along. We struggled with login quirks, we documented unexpected behavior on an FAQ page, and we set up a clear structure and layout for the site, before extending the use to the hoards.
Make it valuable, fast and easy to use. If the information is useful, and the wiki is the easiest and fastest way to get it, people will use it. Put the juiciest stuff there and encourage people to bookmark the page. Include links to the wiki in your email to drive people there for answers to their questions. And make sure the wiki has a brilliant search function. You can't rely on your organizing taxonomy to make information easy to find. What's logical to one person won't necessarily be understood and followed by dozens of others. As the size of the wiki grows it's bound to get messy, and when that happens, search is going to be your best friend.
Monitor who's using it and who's not, and check on why people aren't using the tool. If you notice someone's never logged in, assume it's because they are having trouble doing so, not because they're disinterested. If someone rarely accesses the tool, ask them for their reasons, and what kinds of information they'd find useful to share on the wiki. Then keep your eyes open for ways to be helpful to them by pointing them toward the wiki when appropriate.
Coercion and mild threats of consequences for not adopting the tool. Much of my motivation for starting, and continuing, to use these various wikis is selfish. There's only one of me, and the increasingly administrative demands on my time are starting to interfere with my social life. And I greatly prefer referring people to the wiki over digging through my files to find the latest version of some document to attach to an email in answer to a query.
Perseverance. As I've already mentioned, the alternative is unthinkable. I wake up every day with a strong feeling that eventually each and every one of these laggards will rejoice in the astonishing usefulness of this collaboration tool. Then all my work will be truly appreciated! Of course, it may turn out that I get my reward in heaven. Oh well. I still refuse to give up!

What Didn't Work

Sending out an email message announcing the existence of an exciting new tool and expecting people to follow the instructions and start using it. (Yes, we foolishly tried this initially.)
Failing to emphasize the "WIIFM" for the people you'd like to get to use the tool. People are busy. Answer the question "What In It For Me?" with a compelling benefit for each of the people you are getting involved and they'll be far more likely to battle the learning curve to at least explore your wiki. The invitation messages automatically generated by these tools aren't nearly enough to do that.
Assuming that everyone can figure out how to get up to speed on new technology on their own. Sitting beside them, or calling them on the phone one by one, talking them through the first login experience, patiently helping them get started, was much more effective.

Getting people to adopt new tools requires getting them to change their behavior—no small task. (Ever try changing your spouse? Just try to get your husband to put the toilet seat down after every use, for example, and you'll see what I mean.) But, no worries, building on the valuable collaboration lessons of the past, our team is creating a much more promising future. Although I still sometimes feel like I'm collaborating all by myself, many more people are using the wiki much more frequently. Change, although seemingly glacial, is taking hold in the way we do business. Instead of receiving requests to update documents attached to email, I now get the occasional email from other people referring me to the wiki to share information that needs to be seen and updated by multiple people. Several people seem to have caught the wiki update bug, frequently adding to the substantial knowledge store there. Another person has volunteered to take the lead on cleaning up some organization and formatting problems for some pages that have gotten a bit too much of that patchwork quilt look. And yet another early adopter has vowed to use part of her Christmas vacation to create and populate a whole new branch of the wiki dedicated to a new project we're kicking off next year.

Wikis are not the only area of collaboration that brought me to my knees this past year, mind you. The leader of a group I'd been working with on a joint white paper for several months tired of the slow pace of the group collaboration and wrote it himself. A couple of perfectly legitimate opt-in group mailing lists stopped working mysteriously this past summer when internet providers changed their definition of what constituted spam. For months email sent to these opt-in lists failed to reach their intended recipients, without so much as a clue to alert me to this until I wondered why attendance had dropped at our events. And my office manager routinely reprioritizes my most strategically important business matters below those tasks that he considers more appealing to work on. Nevertheless, if we're going to play games that only a team can win, we have no choice but to figure out how to work together more effectively as a team.

January 1 is rolling around again pretty soon. What theme will I choose for the coming year? Who knows?! But, next year I just might decide to collaborate all by myself.

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The Where, Who, and When of Risk Management

2009-09-28T08:43:26-07:00

by Kimberly M. Wiefling, M.S.

Project risk management had seemed straightforward enough to me when I first became a project manager. But over the last decade I've started to appreciate the nuances of what now seems to me to be more of an art than a science. Since our theme this month is risk, I'm going to muse about some interesting aspects of risk management that are sometimes overlooked.

Documenting Your Demise

Quite a few years ago I attended a talk by Donald G. Reinertsen, author of the fairly famous book Developing Products in Half the Time. He claimed that the biggest mistake people make in managing risk is to identify the risk but do nothing about it. That certainly rang true for my experience. And it makes perfect sense, since there are never enough resources to address all possible risks. In most projects you just can't afford to prepare for every possibility. With that in mind, I consciously put less emphasis on making a comprehensive list of all possible risks, and focus instead on a shorter list (just those at the top of the pile, usually prioritized by calculating likelihood x impact for each risk), and preventing or mitigating the biggest, baddest, and ugliest of the bunch. Long lists of risks you do nothing about are just documenting your demise.

How Risky Does it FEEL?

As I wrote this article I was sitting on the deck of Esalen Institute overlooking the rugged coastline. My ears were buffeted by the sound of the surf intermingled with the four drummers pounding out a soulful rhythm that got a few people dancing and two children twirling endlessly. Amidst such a blissful environment it didn't feel like there's much at risk. And maybe there wasn't, but that's one of the interesting things about risk—you can't use how you feel as a guide to how much risk you're taking. A project manager who thinks nothing of driving all over town for meetings might need a stiff drink to step onto an airplane to go meet the increasingly large part of the team that's located on a different continent. People are notorious for not being able to accurately judge the level of risk accurately for a host of psychological reasons. If that's a blind spot for risk managers, my next beef is about a clear case of risk management tunnel vision.

When, Where, and Who Cares?

When project teams engage in risk management they often focus on "What" could happen to threaten the project goals, the assumption being that the only risks we care about are the risks to the goals. That would be terrific, if those goals represented all stakeholders with an interest in the project (in priority order, of course!). But project goals frequently do a poor job of precisely describing "success." As you may know from personal experience, many projects are plagued by unclear, misunderstood, rapidly shifting, or purposely postponed goals (a.k.a. SCRUM, Agile, Lean, spiral model, whatever you want to call common sense iterative product development these days). And, in spite of much consciousness raising over the past 20 years, measures of project success still routinely ignore metrics associated with employee retention and long-term customer loyalty, to name a few. Even in this age of Corporate Social Responsibility, most projects aren't tracking "reducing our negative impact on the earth" as a high-priority metric of success. Nope, just thinking about risk from the standpoint of What threatens the all-too-often nebulous and ill-defined goals of a project just isn't going to cut it. We need to explore the Who, When and Where of project risk.

Surf's Up!

Let me illustrate with the issue of global warming. Much attention is focused on What is predicted will happen—shrinking glaciers, rising oceans, fleeing populations. (Glaciers are on my mind lately because a friend of mine recently launched a non-profit called Ice911 to re-grow glaciers using a "planetary band-aid" that can be put in place quickly—and removed once it's no longer needed. Check it out!) But the more complex issues regarding the risks associated with global warming revolve around questions like:

Who

Who will be impacted by the rising oceans?
Who will be impacted by measures to address the issue?
Who is the cause? (possibly cows, or so I am told)
Who is responsible for tackling the issue?

When

When might the oceans rise—at what rate?
When will the water level start to rise noticeably, and when will it peak?
When do we need to start taking action in order to prevent them from doing so?

Where

Where will populated land be flooded?
Where will all of these people live?
Where will the water level peak, or will we all need to become better swimmers?

You might notice that all four groups in the Who category are potentially different. Suppose, just for the sake of argument, that cows truly are the biggest source of global warming. Well, they certainly can't be counted upon to tackle the issue—that's probably going to be largely in the hands of the wise government leaders of our world. Those impacted by the economics of treaties and regulations are likely to be businesses and consumers in developed nations, while those fleeing to higher ground include anyone within a meter or two of sea level, with a greater burden falling on people without the means to easily re-locate. The mismatch between those impacted by risk prevention activities and those impacted if the risk is not avoided leads to much of the controversy about how to respond to this risk. Without considering the Who, it's going to be pretty tough to decide How to address the What. How is your risk analysis shaped by the stakeholders in your project?

Measuring Success 1000 Years From Now

On the surface, When isn't quite as complicated, but it's fraught with landmines. Human beings are notorious for their inability to connect cause and effect when they are separated by large spans of time or space. Is smoking bad for your health? By now most people agree that it is, but it doesn't usually kill you until years later, so it's tempting to take a puff and think about quitting tomorrow. What is the time horizon we need to be concerned about for a given risk? Do we measure success in averting disaster over the next 10 years, 50 years, 1000 years, or in perpetuity? Can we assume that at some point this issue will become irrelevant, either because of advances in civilization or the complete demise of the planet due to other causes?

Certainly the timeframe over which we wish to avert risk impacts which risks we need to consider and how we address them. A company concerned about this quarter's revenues might ship a product that makes a profit today. Ten years later that product is discovered to result in illness or death, and lawsuits costing shareholders billions of dollars. A team commercializing medical devices only needs to guard against late supplier deliveries during critical regulatory test phases, but their focus needs to switch to guarding against life-threatening quality control issues throughout the entire life of the product. "Success" is a snapshot in time. Many a "successful" marriage at the two-year mark is on the relationship scrap heap after ten years. (Which is why I think perhaps marriages should have an expiration date . . . OK, maybe not! If my mum reads this she's going to faint.) Anyway, we need to carefully consider the timeframe of our risk analysis, When a particular risk might occur, and over what time period that risk is relevant to the success of our project. What is the timeframe over which you are considering risk for your project?

WHERE is the Risk?

Many a swimmer is more afraid of sharks than deer—as well they should be if they're swimming. But if you live in the US you are 300 times more likely to be killed by a deer than a shark. Of course that's more likely to happen to you when you're riding in a car, not swimming in the ocean. As any animal enthusiast can see, risk also depends on Where you are. Just like realtors, risk managers need to consider "location, location, location." One of my clients won't even build a production facility in certain countries because of the risk that the completed plant might later be claimed as government property. These days, project managers need to consider risk as a function of location in the world. Tornadoes happen in Kansas and hurricanes in Florida. What location-dependent risks does your project face?

Life's Not Fair

As project leaders, we need to consider the risks to all parties who may be impacted by our project. In order to do this properly we need to do a thorough stakeholder analysis as part of our risk analysis. Why? Because life's not fair. Consequences rarely align with causes. As leaders we have the responsibility to represent absent stakeholders and make up for the misalignment between cause and effect. Over many years of leading projects I've noticed that the consequences of poor choices in projects often accrue to someone other than the people making those choices. Designers take a shortcut that dooms the customer support team to excess costs throughout the lifecycle of the product. An executive promises an impossible milestone to a key customer, so the whole project suffers while the schedule is pretzeled to accommodate it. Features creep inexorably toward infinity, while the time available for QA testing shrinks as the schedule slips. "Them that done it ain't them that feel the sting!"

Risk Scope Creep

I'm advocating risk management scope creep. Don't just identify risks. Think about the Who, When, and Where:

First, identify the stakeholders who may be impacted by your project, for better or worse.
Explicitly specify a timeframe over which you are considering risk.
Location, location, location.

Alternatively, you and your team could skip risk analysis altogether, hide your head in the sand like a big ol' ostrich, and just come into work every day and "do your best." That's a recipe for the riskiest project of all.

Related Items
Got risk? Get to the root of it with the right conversations and problem-solving techniques, then make a recommendation. Need help from someone further up the chain? Escalate it! Not sure if it's worth it to correct for a risk? Expected Monetary Value calculations can help your team assess the value of a risk as well as the value of any potential solutions. (Or just flip a coin!)

Clarity - The Cure for Muddy Thinking

2009-07-20T11:49:31-07:00

by Kimberly M. Wiefling, M.S.

Aloha! The ocean's roar fills my ears, and a beautiful Kona sunset paints the sky. But me, I'm thinking about mud. Muddy thinking, to be exact. Being educated as a physicist, as I was, has its drawbacks. For one, most people assume we have no marketable skills. Sometimes we are misunderstood. I once was contacted by somebody wanting help with their "aura". Apparently "psychic" and "physics" are pretty close in the dictionary. But the biggest challenge I'm facing these days—and I think it's a result of the extremely rigorous and self-consistent thinking I learned during those years—is a complete lack of tolerance for what I call muddy thinking. People work on low priority items while urgent issues languish. Teams fall apart because no one confronts behaviors that undermine trust. Organizations spend huge amounts of money on a project, then suddenly wonder how they will measure success. These bizarre behaviors may seem like examples of muddy behaviors, but to me they indicate either a brain that has flat-lined or a total lack of clarity about what really matters.

Muddy thinking is jeopardizing far too many people's success, and your project may be getting stuck in some of this mud. Here's my approach to thinking and acting with clarity in order to steer clear of the morass. Regardless of your title, position, or job, you need these three sharp instruments in your professional tool belt to stay out of the mud pit:

Personal Values
Written, Measurable Goals
Priority Lists

Personal Values. Unless you want to be known as a leader who is blown about like a leaf in a hurricane, you need to anchor yourself to the rock of personal values. Personal values are the ideals and beliefs that we consider important to who we are. It's what matters to us more than our comfort or the approval of others. Every leader should know their values because they're directly related to what you stand for as a leader. Clear values guide behavior, focus attention, and speed certain decisions—in particular those where some options involve violating one or more personal values. A value is something that is non-negotiable, as opposed to a "nice to have" feature. Consider the analogy of buying a car. You might be willing settle for cloth seats instead of leather, but you're not going to buy a car without a steering wheel. Likewise, a personal value of integrity makes it easy to decide whether to take responsibility for a mistake on the project or blame someone else.

If you can't immediately list your top three values I highly recommend that you work through a values exercise like the list of 374 values by Steve Pavlina, author of Personal Development for Smart People,. A good way to do this is to print out the list, cut the words apart so you have 374 little pieces of paper in front of you, and then sort them into four piles according to those which are:

Always important to you
Usually important to you
Sometimes important to you
Never important to you

Now throw out all of the piles except the first one, the Always pile. (You might be thinking that you only needed two piles, Always and Not Always, but it is fascinating to go through this exercise with four piles.) Pick your top ten most important values from the remaining pile. Next choose the top three most important values out of your top ten, and put those in priority order. Now, if you really want to understand how these values translate into action, make a table with your top three values like the one below. List typical behaviors and language that represent you living within and outside of these values. Here's an example:

Value	Behavior and Language that is Aligned with this Value	Behavior and Language that is NOT Aligned with this Value
Integrity	Being honest, fair, transparent, and open in my dealings with other people. Being willing to stand up for what I believe in. Doing the right thing, even if it is inconvenient. Admitting my mistakes.	Lying, cheating, stealing, lack of follow through on commitments, abusing power, allowing other people to be abused by power. Avoiding responsibility. Publishing schedules that are patently ridiculous.
Freedom	Making choices based on my own sense of what's right or appropriate. Seeking supportive colleagues and environments. Living within my financial means so I can quit jobs that violate my values.	Trading freedom for job security, money, status, or power. Making choices merely to please other people. Working in environments that actively discourage telling the truth about the project.
Abundance	Having a mental frame of "There's plenty!" Appreciating the work of others. Sharing what I have. Sharing opportunity, power, decision-making. Taking turns. Helping others succeed.	Having a scarcity mentality. Clutching greedily on to what I have. Always keeping the best opportunities for myself. Avoiding sharing power. Playing win-lose. Taking credit for the work of others.

If you are clear about your personal values, you can immediately rule out scads of choices and behaviors that might otherwise clog up your project leadership decision-making process. (This is a bit dangerous because sometimes long held beliefs about what's right and wrong can turn out to be flawed, and you may find yourself at the end of your life looking back on a mountain of regret. So do test your beliefs from time to time to see whether you, your beliefs, or the world has changed.)

Written, Measurable Goals. Most of my work is with multi-national Japanese companies committed to becoming truly global. Our project teams create transformational experiences that enable people to become truly global leaders, not just learn about global leadership. However, we frequently find ourselves having this kind of conversation with prospective clients:

Client: "We'd like your help. We need a program that will develop our people into global leaders."

Our Team: "Great! What is your definition of a global leader?"

Client: "We don't know."

To be fair, there is a great deal of disagreement about the definition of a global leader, so I'm not saying it's easy to define. I'm just surprised that people have budgeted a good chunk of $1M without coming up with something a bit more meaty about the outcomes they'd like to produce by spending that money. Not one to play the victim, naturally I developed my own definition of global leadership consisting of seven characteristics in five key areas. No doubt experts around the world would disagree heartily with my definition, but at least I am sailing with a rudder in my boat and a clear destination.

It's also amazing how little thought some people give to their goals until after they have spent lots of time and money pursuing them. One company that I've been working with for over three years recently asked me how we should measure the success of the program I've been leading. "Gosh," I thought, "is this a trick question?" Smirking only slightly, I suggested that they measure the success against the goals that they had outlined for the program when the contract was signed (somewhere in the executive stratosphere, where nary a Scrappy PM roams). I've been using my own scorecard of success for this program, but only recently has the client shown any interest whatsoever in it.

You never have to settle for unclear goals in your own project, work, or life. What you make up might be the wrong goals, but at least they will be clear! And having them in writing and measurable will make it easier to argue about what's wrong with them so that you can get agreement with your colleagues about which are the right ones.

Priority Lists. Because there is never enough time to do everything, project leaders live and die by their priorities. Every project needs clear priorities to drive decision making and resource allocation, as does every major piece of every project. And if you are working on more than one thing at a time, which covers pretty much everyone except taxi drivers and my dad, the whole wad of projects must be prioritized relative to each other.

I've been doing a prioritization experiment with my biggest client in Japan. At the beginning of 2009 I caught wind of various rumors that several people who were not directly part of our program were a bit annoyed because they didn't know what was going on in our exciting part of the business. No, I didn't stomp into the president's office demanding increased transparency (. . . but if I had it would have been in Japanese, of course, with a bit of bowing thrown in, and a few sumimasens . . . ) and I didn't launch a campaign for improved organization-wide communication.

Instead I took an immediate and very low-tech approach and hung two giant pieces of flip chart paper in what has come to be known as "Kimberly's Korner." One lists our overall priorities for this program, which is how I decide how to spend my time and how to match up resources with needs. Number one is delighting the current playing client—something no businessperson can afford to lose sight of ever, but especially this year. The second is getting more paying clients. (If you want to know priorities # 3 and #4, you'll just have to visit Tokyo.) The other flip chart lists the current projects within the program, in priority order. The name of each project is on a separate post note, and I re-order them and update the chart every time I'm in town. There's also a big note inviting comments and questions, but I've received none. Now I'm not naive enough to take this absence of comments as a sign that the priorities are now clear, but at least people who can read are no longer complaining. And, to my delight, one of the executives has used my own lists against me to get me to put aside something I was working on to work on something that was important to them. Wahoo! Sometimes success comes in baby steps.

Values, goals, priorities. What could be simpler? Well, as usual, it's simple, but not easy. We all fall short of our own ideals from time to time. That's no reason to lower our standards. We all miss our targets now and then. That's no reason to aim lower. And we all clean off our desk, check email, or go to Hawaii, when we should be working on the article that's due to Project Connections by July 15. But having these to steer by helps us avoid permanently spinning our wheels in the mud pit of projects, or our life.

Looking forward to hearing your stories of how you beat muddy thinking!

- Kimberly

Related Items
Kimberly's Priorities, Goals and Actions Alignment worksheet can help you sort out whether your actions are moving you toward your goals. Keep track of your project's priorities by recording a clear vision statement and sharing it with everyone.

Eat Your Spinach. It's Good for You

2009-05-12T10:12:46-07:00

Having the Unpleasant Conversations You'd Rather Avoid

by Kimberly M. Wiefling, M.S.

There's one project leadership challenge that I dread above all others: talking with a team member who is underperforming relative to the needs of the project and/or the unrealistically high standards of excellence that I hold for myself and others. It's not that I'm conflict averse. In fact, there are times when I flat out enjoy a roiling argument or a self-righteous rant. In those cases, I don't bloody well care what the other party thinks of me, nor whether the relationship will be in tatters as a result. Hey, sometimes I'm even purposely torturing the poor bugger! But when it's a friend, colleague, or team member with whom I'd like to have some kind of continuing civility, maybe even a productive working relationship, it can be downright paralyzing. "What if I screw it up?" I muse to myself. "What if I inappropriately blurt out my frustrations with their perceived ineptness?" I ruminate. If they are critical to the success of the project, and rather difficult to replace in a pinch, I wonder "What if they tell me to get stuffed, scream that they never want to see my ugly puss again, or simply spend the remainder of the project seething quietly, hostility oozing from every pore, while deftly undermining every important aspect of the project within their grasp?" It's enough to stop me dead in my tracks just around the bend from their office, or freeze my index finger poised just above the bright green 'call' button on my brand new iPhone.

"Good Enough" Performance

In some ways, if someone is doing a truly abysmal job, it's a no-brainer. The sense of obligation most competent project leaders feel to deliver results usually outweighs the importance they place on preserving any one particular relationship. After all, truly scrappy project leaders are used to going up against wayward suppliers, tardy action item owners, and unreasonable executives in order to meet commitments. If they're undeniably awful, then you simply must take action. If you don't, the rest of the team becomes demoralized, and then you have two problems to solve!

Marginal performance problems are a bit trickier because it's too easy to cling to hope that things will improve on their own. If someone's performance is arguably adequate, there are all kinds of ways to talk yourself out of having what can be a rather delicate and dangerous conversation about what's bugging you. Wouldn't it be better to settle for mediocre results and have everyone get along? Ah, yes ... let's all join hands and sing "Kumbaya" or "We Are the World" while the project goes to hell in a hand basket.

Actually, no, that's not gonna work for long, and you can't afford the antacid you'll need to deal with your chagrin as you watch results creep inexorably towards "good enough." When performance is consistently "adequate," you owe it to your project, your team, yourself, and the person in question to have an open and honest dialogue about it. Otherwise, you simply feed the conspiracy of low standards that is the norm in many organizations. It goes something like this: "I won't hold you accountable, so don't you dare hold me accountable, and we'll all get along pretty well while collectively contributing to mediocrity in our projects, our businesses, and ourselves." (Patrick Lencioni addresses this source of organizational dry rot in The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, if you want to explore the roots of this widespread corporate disease further.) Not only is that kind of behavior unprofitable, it's an unconscionable failure of leadership that every decent project manager ought to scrupulously avoid.

What Unresolved Performance Situation is Tapping You on the Shoulder?

If you're working with a dozen or more human beings there's a pretty good chance that there's at least one relationship in need of a delicate conversation. Which one is it? Where have you looked the other way, bitten your tongue, or kept a tight-lipped look of resignation on your face rather than speak up and address an issue that's nagging at you? Living with unresolved situations like this is kind of like paddling a canoe from the stern while a wild cougar is roaming loose in the bow. You can't focus on keeping the boat moving in the right direction, and you sure as hell can't enjoy the scenery during the trip!

If you do indeed have such an opportunity lurking in your canoe, maybe it's time to hoist yourself up by the backbone you were born with and tackle it head on. If so, here's an approach that could take a load off your mind, resolve the issue, leave the relationship intact (or maybe even better off), and put an end to merely tolerating—or secretly loathing—the other person. Besides, human beings are pretty good at picking up non-verbal emotional signals, and we tend to overestimate our ability to hide our true feelings. If you're harboring some longstanding resentment towards a team member, chances are they already suspect it. It stands to reason that this awareness is creating an even greater negative impact on results than their initial performance lapses, and the responsibility for that incremental impact is entirely due to you. It's time to step up and do the tough job. That's why you get paid the big bucks.

Run It Like a Project

You wouldn't start an important project without a careful analysis of the stakeholders and a rigorous definition of the goals. Neither should you embark on the adventure of a delicate dialogue without doing the same.

1. Prepare Thoroughly

Who's involved? Who are the stakeholders in this interaction? Certainly, you and the other person, but think about others as well. How about the rest of the team? Their family? (As we all know, sometimes personal issues can contribute to lapses in excellence.) Mutual friends? What are the goals of engaging them in the conversation—for you, for them, for your relationship in the future? To borrow a trendy TV term, what do you want as an outcome for the "intervention"? What problem are you solving? I find it's helpful to fill out a grid like this:

Observable Facts that Everyone on Earth Would Agree On	My Perceptions, Which Seem True Enough, But Are Merely One Way of Perceiving the World	The Story I'm Telling Myself Based on These Facts and Perceptions
They were 3 – 5 minutes late for 3 of the past 4 meetings.	They seem to be unaware that they are coming in late.	They don't value my time, and they are trying to show me who's boss by testing the boundary of meeting start-time with me.
They took actions that were different that we had agreed upon in our meetings.	They can't seem to remember what we agreed, and they talk as if they are very sure they are remembering accurately, and I'm the one who got it wrong.	They've got a brain tumor and they don't want to tell me the bad news just yet.
The client told me that they had some concerns about the clarity of the communication in the meeting.	The client is frustrated with this person, and they're approaching me when they should be addressing their issues to this person directly.	They failed to build a strong relationship with the client, and now I have to waste my valuable time sorting out the trivial problems that arise between them and the client.
When I make comments in client meetings, they start over half of their sentences with the word No, and then set about basically agreeing with me.	They seem intent on contradicting me in front of clients, even when we are pretty much in agreement.	They don't respect me and they are determined to undermine my standing with our clients. They're a certifiable sociopath.

The essential element here is to clearly distinguish between perception, reality, and the whack-job story that a brain sometimes conjures up to explain what's happening in the outside world.

Clearly, you have to develop some kind of compassion for the other person before engaging in the discussion, or it's just going to be a stream of vitriol that will leave behind only the smoldering remains of your former relationship. I find it helpful to ask, "What would have to be true for this person's behavior to make perfect sense ... in fact, given similar circumstances, I'd do the very same thing?" This application of the assumption of positive intent helps to avoid falling into the blame game trap. If you can't come up with anything more plausible than "brain tumor," don't do it alone. Get help with the meeting. You're going to need someone to facilitate the discussion to keep it from going over a cliff. Another surprise ... sometimes just filling out this table is enough to solve the problem, even without the discussion. Sometimes our stories are the real source of our grievance. When we consider that our stories might not be "the truth," some problems dissolve into minor irritations, or evaporate altogether.

2. Pick the Time and Location with Care

Arrange a time that's totally convenient for them, and won't have either of you rushing off to another meeting. Schedule twice as much time as you think you will need, then add a bit more buffer just to be safe. After all, most projects are 2 – 3 times over schedule. Do it on neutral ground—absolutely away from the office, preferably someplace with a nice ambiance and a positive vibe (which excludes nearby meat-packing plants or the county jail). Pick a place that the other person would appreciate. Sitting outdoors in a breezy café sipping strawberry lemonade is a good choice for some, over a beer at a down-to-earth sports bar with Jim Rome yammering on in the background works for others. Just make sure it's someplace the other person would feel comfortable. And bring your credit card—this one's your treat whether your company reimburses you or not.

3. Dress for the Occasion

Costume impacts the way we feel, and the way others respond to us. Wear something that makes you feel good about yourself, and communicates that this is an important business meeting. Don't outclass them with a snazzy suit. Try to look like a decent, humble, well-intentioned professional who is taking the meeting seriously. No dark glasses, please. Eye contact is a crucial element of this kind of communication, as is a facial expression of sincere respect and a relaxed posture. No looking at your watch, no foot tapping, no eye rolling, and no nail biting.

4. Treat Them with Dignity, Compassion, and Respect

Don't just schedule the meeting and surprise them with the content. Tell them that you have some concerns about your working relationship, and that you value their relationship enough to work through it. Ask if they'd be willing to get together to talk through the issues and work out a mutually agreeable solution. If they say no, well, that's useful information right there, and a whole 'nuther column I have yet to write.

Arrive ahead of time, greet them warmly, with a smile, thank them for agreeing to take the time to hear your concerns and talk through the issues. Reaffirm how much you value the relationship with as much sincerity as you can muster, and keep a friendly tone and look on your face throughout. (Studies have shown that people feel better after hearing negative comments from someone who says them in a positive tone of voice with a big smile, but feel worse after hearing positive comments delivered in a negative way.)

Clearly state up front that you will be sharing your perceptions and interpretations—which, no doubt, differ from their own. Distinguishing observable facts from the stories and negative judgments conjured up around the facts is your most powerful tool in this kind of communication. You are completely responsible for your interpretations and stories. They are only responsible for the observable facts. Keep that straight and you'll find that these conversations go a lot smoother. If you find out someone is always 5 minutes late for your meetings because the clock on their computer is set 5 minutes slow, it has a much different impact than if you think they're just blowing you off. And it's easy to fix! Ranting at them about how they don't appreciate the value of your time will only make them think you're unreasonable and delay the solution.

5. Stay Focused on the Goals and on Future Possibilities

Even while you're being warm and friendly, you're there to achieve a result, so don't lose your nerve. Stay committed to the goals for your conversation, and work toward achieving them. State right up front what you intend to achieve during the meeting. Something like, "By the end of our conversation I'd like to have come to an understanding of the issues that have been causing me to feel a bit of grinding between us, have agreed on some mutually acceptable ways to work through these issues going forward, and have our relationship be in better shape than it was when we started the conversation." Then make sure you both have a chance to talk and listen to each other's perspective and come to clear agreements on each issue. Of course it takes a bit of practice to speak with such eloquence while sweating and wringing your hands in a potentially conflict-ridden circumstance, so be sure to practice it out loud a few times in the bathroom before they show up. Pay no attention to that flushing sound in the next stall ... unless it's the person you're meeting, of course!

6. End on a Positive Note

Review anything positive that came out of the experience, including anything you learned about yourself through having the discussion. Mention how relieved you are to have had the chance to talk through the issues rather than keeping them bottled up inside, and show appreciation for their willingness to engage in the tough conversation. Assure them that your relationship has been refreshed by going through this difficulty together.

7. If They Don't Make You Sorry, Thank Them!

Assuming that they haven't gone postal on you, slashed your tires, or gone around bad-mouthing you to the entire project team, offer them your heartfelt thanks for joining you on this daunting journey, and for sticking with it even when it got a little bumpy. Talk about the future, and how you look forward to a much more enjoyable working relationship now that they've given you the opportunity to share your concerns. And follow up with them the next day to restate your thanks for their professional and personal maturity in the matter. Praise them for anything that you can authentically appreciate in their behavior during the meeting, and tell them what you honestly admire about them. No one ever gets enough of that.

Some Things Don't Stay Fixed

Of course, you might find yourself dealing with the same irritating situation a short while later. That's why you should also take time during your discussion to agree how to handle the situation if it comes up again. Say something like, "I hear how committed you are to resolving this, and I am too. How do you want me to bring this up in the future if we start to have this same issue again?" Taking their suggestions for how to follow up and reinforce the agreed upon solutions increases their commitment to keeping the agreements you made.

If you follow these steps, you'll achieve a much higher success rate than your fears might lead you to believe. Most people know their shortcomings better than we do, and won't be at all surprised when you bring them up. They've heard them before, frequently from the little voice in their head. And sometimes you'll discover that you've been anguishing over a simple misunderstanding. No matter what the outcome, if you want your relationship with that person to be something more than professional tolerance of each other, you have a responsibility to have the conversation. Letting mental baggage build up between you and co-workers just feeds the dysfunctional corporate culture that so many of us complain about but claim we have no part in creating. Half of that all too common dysfunction comes from conversations that should never have happened, like gossip and thoughtless criticism, but the other half starts with conversations that should have happened, but didn't. Don't add to the misery index in the world by leaving these important conversations unspoken!

Now ... deep breath, good luck, and write and let me know how it goes.

– Kimberly

Here It Comes Again!

2009-03-02T14:33:33-08:00

Coping with the Worldwide Economic Mood Disorder
and Other Recurring Problems

by Kimberly M. Wiefling, M.S.

The current global crisis, which I'm calling the "worldwide economic mood disorder" (WEMD for short), hit right about the time I was feeling that I'd finally recovered from the dot-com bubble bust of 2001. Although that period of business convulsions did reach beyond the Silicon Valley, my neighborhood was definitely "ground zero." I'm still sorting through the emotional baggage of that period of my life, and was just about to pay off the loans I used to finance starting my business back then, when the news came in over the wire: "The whole world's just gone to hell in a hand basket!" "Well isn't that a fine how-do-you-do?" I thought to myself. (Actually, my thoughts were quite a bit more obscene than that, but you'll have to fill in the blanks for yourself. See any guide to "How to Cuss Like a Sailor" and you'll get the idea of my reaction when I realized that we were poised once more to go on that roller coaster ride.)

Times may be tough, but project managers are used to such tough times. We face seemingly impossible challenges on every project. This is the perfect time to draw upon your ability to clarify goals, prioritize ruthlessly, create viable plans, and then execute them with excellence. We're used to balancing optimism about the future with a healthy realism about the challenges we're facing today. By applying the same discipline that we use in a typical project, we can find ways to succeed in dark times and be an inspiration to others.

Like economic mood swings, some project management problems tend to be difficult to avoid and recur periodically. Like bathing, or going to church, you can't just do it once and be done with it. While a lot of projects experience recurrent problems that are predictable and avoidable, some aren't. When prevention and avoidance aren't an option, it's best to have a strategy for rapidly identifying and dealing with them. We should expect that we'll need to deal with these predictably recurrent issues, and learn to handle them better every time. Human problems often fall into this category. Some of the typical human problems that crop up repeatedly in projects are:

Misunderstandings
Expectation mismanagement
Interpersonal conflict
Emotional melt-downs
Team member burnout

In the interest of space, I've left off the other 7,268 that I've personally experienced. If you're a project manager working with humans you can be sure you'll face such a problem in the near future. Rather than waiting with fingers crossed, hoping for the best, do something about it in advance. If you knew that you'd need to take a bath every day or so you'd make sure you had access to a shower, some soap and a little privacy. Knowing we'll face human problems on a regular basis, we need techniques that enable us to deal with them promptly, effectively, and . . . well, repeatedly.

Cross-Cultural Collaboration

Most of my work has been in Japan these days, where companies are facing similar challenges to the US, but taking a decidedly different approach. In a sense, Japan has been in a recession for over twenty years, so they just got used to functioning in an inhospitable environment. Most of my work is with native Japanese speaking people, and I don't speak Japanese (OK, I can order a beer and some edamame beans in a pinch), so I can pretty much guarantee that our team will experience one or more of the aforementioned problems, and many more, daily. Knowing we'll be hitting these stumbling blocks again and again, we've evolved some simple practices that have helped to keep these problems from wrecking our relationships and scuttling our teamwork. Here's what's been working for us:

Daily Debriefs – A lot of our work happens at a client site, doing workshops and consulting in an environment that sometimes feels like a pressure-cooker. One or two of us will be working with 15–20 people while the other person handles logistics and keeps communication flowing with our project sponsor. No matter how exhausted we are, at the end of the day we find time to share our perspectives on how the day went, specifically addressing these two questions:

What worked well?, and
What would we change that would work better in the future?

Sometimes we have to do it in a taxi, a crowded train, or a coffee shop, but a noodle house that serves tasty sake is my favorite. This really helps to clear the air and get ready for the next day's challenges. As simple as this is, it has greatly improved our teamwork. Everyone knows that they will have a chance to air their issues at the end of the day, so we don't feel the need to engage in distracting behaviors during the day when a solution can wait for the evening debrief. And starting off with some positive comments reminds us all of the positive aspects of our project and our team.

Most of the time we manage to identify and resolve issues with a minimum of grief. A daily debrief during intense times might be a net time saver for you and your team. Of course, sometimes someone gets defensive or argumentative, or has a complete emotional collapse, which brings me to my next point.

Create a "Time for a Time-out" Signal – When we push ourselves into the red zone, don't get enough sleep, and are powerfully committed to doing an excellent job, our personalities can get a little frayed around the edges. We can become unreasonable, emotionally fragile, irritated, or all of the above. As far as I can tell it happens to most human beings. Age helps, but until then, here's another idea. We need a way to signal that a meltdown is either in progress or about to occur.

A dear friend and colleague helped me create a name for my "other self," the one who is completely exhausted and starting to say and do things that I will regret and have to spend a lot of time cleaning up later. When I feel the onset of "Obakachan" (I think it is a friendly way of saying I'm acting like an idiot, but could also possibly mean I have a root growing out of my forehead) I say, "I've got to get some rest. Obakachan is coming," and then hightail it for a nice hot bath. If someone else notices first, they'll gently mention this pet name and I'll sheepishly stop being a jerk and take some time to think about things before continuing the discussion. How can you signal your team that it's time for a time-out?

Build Relationships and Trust Before You Hit the Skids – Spending some non-work time hanging out with people and talking about something besides work really helps smooth out the bumpy ride of inevitable conflict. I never go into the office without at least a few paltry candies to share at the team table, and I make a point of scheduling non-work social activities with people with whom I work most intensely. Spending a half-day walking through Kobe's Chinatown and waterfront with one of my key teammates, as I recently did, is not only enjoyable, but builds the kind of relationship that can withstand the next inevitable clash in styles or opinions. When was that last time you spent some time re-connecting with your team members on a personal level? Even a walk and talk at lunch with no action items or work agenda could strengthen your ability to weather the next storm together.

While these techniques don't rank up there with stochastic estimation techniques or Monte Carlo simulation as nuclear powered tools in your project management arsenal, they're practical, easy to implement, and they are proven to work even in the cauldron of cross-cultural collaboration. Give it a whirl and let me know what happens, and what else works with your team.

Don't Let Your Attitude Make Problems Worse

Ever since the Great Depression the world has known that the global economy goes through mood swings. And, while the seeds of these economic disasters are real enough, the majority of the destructive aftermath is self-induced—through an overreaction of pessimism and lack of confidence. If banks, businesses, and individuals would behave in a less reactive fashion we'd all get through this financial trough more quickly.

The same goes for human problems. Sure, they tend to be thorny and uncomfortable to deal with, and it's tempting to withdraw from the process when relationships falter. But, just like in the intricately interconnected worldwide economic web, our fates are inextricably linked. In every project we're playing a game only a team can win. If we want a healthy team environment, we've got to learn to deal with these issues day after day instead of settling for tense relationships, rivalries, and factions. We're all better off when we stay engaged, stay committed to the goals and each other, and work together to create a brighter future.

And as for the worldwide economic mood disorder, use your project management skills to create a pocket of possibility on the cloudy horizon. We're trained for this!

Don’t Try This Alone! Whacky for Wikis and Crazy for Collaboration

2008-12-18T16:03:48-08:00

by Kimberly M. Wiefling, M.S.

In early December I attended a conference called the "Program for the Future" in honor of Doug Engelbart—best known as the inventor of the computer mouse, but more accurately described as a champion of technology and tools that increase our collective intelligence. Years in the corporate world had made me occasionally doubt the existence of such a thing, so I signed up right away. Legends like Steve Wozniak and Alan Kay were among the luminaries. (I'm pretty sure I was the least famous person there, outside of the one refilling the coffee.) It was a fascinating exploration into the need for collaboration to solve the most pressing challenges facing our world, and the tools that enable it. It seems to me that this should be a topic near and dear to every project leader's heart. After all, this is what we spend much of our working lives doing—steadfastly facilitating collaboration in the pursuit of often seemingly impossible goals outside of the reach of a single human being.

Bringing a Knife to a Gun Fight

Unfortunately, most of the individuals, teams, and organizations I consult with are still limiting their collaboration methods to phone calls, email, or face-to-face discussions in a stuffy conference room. Many meetings are devoid of anything more sophisticated than a pen and paper to capture a few notes, just in case anything worthwhile is accomplished. Don't get caught bringing a knife to a gunfight! In order to avoid the madness of the mob, at the very least, your meeting facilities should have a white board, a flip chart, and a couple of magic markers that haven't dried out from disuse. Maybe throw in a healthy supply of sticky notes—different colored ones, not just the boring yellow kind. These rudimentary supplies enable people to share and capture ideas before they fade away along with the sound waves and the memory of the meeting itself.

Take enabling tools a step farther and consider adding graphical facilitation to your meetings. This is where an artist jacked up on caffeine captures pictures and words from your meeting content at speeds surpassing that of most industrial robots. The essence of your meeting becomes a huge colorful chalk poster on a wall covered in butcher paper. Go completely off the hook and get a couple hundred people to collaborate on creating a forty-foot mural and you really have something you can touch and feel that starts to reflect the wisdom of the crowd.

Techniques like graphical facilitation and giant murals quite literally get people on the same page. Everyone can see what is being drawn or written. And they create a record of what has been said so we'll have a fighting chance against the entropic forces continually working to unravel whatever group memory, agreements, and organization we establish in the chaos of a large and challenging project. But the bottom line of the conference was clear—tools alone are not enough. We must fix the human problems of collaboration.

Whacky for Wikinomics

This conference put me into a remission of sorts. I have a bit of an addictive personality, and had just been recovering from a 3-month obsession with 21st century collaboration methods. The trigger was reading Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything, which I hinted at in a past column. Wikinomics is not just about Wikipedia, and it's certainly not just about the internet either. It's about how hordes of people working together can solve problems and achieve results outside the reach of a single human being, or even hundreds of them. I recognized instantly the power of some of these ideas to transform project management for the better. Although many naysayers scoff at the claims of a "birth of a new era," I think that just proves that these radical notions really are destined to revolutionize how businesses run and how work is done. After all, pretty much every fabulous idea throughout history has been pooh-poohed by respected experts before being embraced.

In the simplest sense, Wikinomics suggests that there are better ways to tap the group genius than the traditional approaches in widespread use in today's corporate world mentioned above. As project managers whose success rests of the ability of groups of people to work together productively, we have got to explore and embrace some of the radical innovations in channeling collective intelligence. Email mailing lists and a shared folder on the intranet are no longer enough to equip our project teams for 21st century success. While there are lots of high-priced web-based collaboration tools out there, I've been rooting around for tools that are either cheap or free so there won't be any budgetary excuses for not adopting them. Here are just a couple I've been experimenting with. While you're reading through the rest of this, I hope you'll be saying, "Oh, sure, I already use something like that."

Skype - Reach Across the Ocean for Free

Oh, go ahead and snort or laugh. I know it's not late-breaking news. Most people grazing on the internet have heard of Skype by now, and 11,627,305 people are using it at the time of this writing. But when I suggest that my clients grab a cheap video camera and use Skype video phone calls to improve their communications with remotely-located colleagues, they exclaim, "Oh, they won't let us use that here." Hey, it's a telephone with a camera, fer cryin' out loud! Do you really think your wireless mobile phone is any more secure? Now, I'm sure some IT people are paid entirely to prevent any cooperation-enabling technology from forcing its way into the corporate computer systems, but most IT people are reasonable corporate citizens who want to do the right thing for us and our projects. Surely they can understand why you'd want to use a telephone with a camera in this day and age. And plenty of CFOs would be thrilled to know that they don't need to spend thousands of dollars for you to fly around the world to see the face of your colleagues, or install and support the relatively more expensive equipment required to make it look like you're in the same room as the other people on your team. (I've used some of these pricier solutions, and they're terrific mind you, but most of the scrappy companies I work with can't afford them.) And here's the big bonus for video phone calls. Seeing someone's face while talking with them is nice, and all, but the best part about a video phone call is that I can see whether the person I'm talking with is checking their email during the call instead of paying attention to our conversation. (Oh, admit it, we all do it from time to time!)

My laptop doesn't have a camera built in (one more reason I plan to chuck it from a moving bus into oncoming traffic very soon), and my home internet connection makes dial-up look attractive, so I only used Skype voice until recently. But I've been converted to video after seeing how my brother uses it to keep in touch with his wife's relatives in Turkey (and upgrading my home internet to increase bandwidth). On Sunday morning my brother's family gets up and turn on Skype with a camera directed toward their kitchen breakfast table. While they prepare eggs and sucuk in Houston, their Turkish relatives are just feeding the kids dinner in Ankara. A microphone lets each family hear what the other is gossiping about, and occasionally someone on one side of the Atlantic Ocean or the other will pop on over to the camera to say something directed at the other family. Oh, and it's all free, mind you. Nothing stands between you and hanging out with your team but a $20 USB camera and a few MBPS.

Wikis - Get Long-standing Home Repairs Done in Record Time

From the Hawaiian word for "quick," a wiki is just a web site, but it's a special kind of web site that enables a group of people to share responsibility for creating, modifying, and growing the content. Google Sites, PBWiki, and Wikispaces are some of the companies offering wikis for those sharing my addiction to consciousness conspiracies.

As a closet control freak, I have to admit that I initially recoiled at the prospect of allowing my teammates to decide what information to put onto a shared project web page and how to organize it. I have a superiority complex the size of a large yacht, and, like most megalomaniacs, I am perpetually convinced that I could do it better. But working on projects too enormous for one human brain to grasp finally forced me to trust the collective IQ of the team. I chose to start with a small experiment—a wiki for me and my two housemates. Here we collect lists of woefully overdue house maintenance tasks like anti-eco leaky toilets and filthy furnace filters posing a serious fire risk. Those of you who have used a wiki know that it can be configured to send an email to everyone participating in the wiki each time the content is updated, so changes in content and status are quickly shared among all users. The toilet, which had been leaking for at least a year and half in spite of my "gentle reminders" about its contribution to the destruction of the planet, was fixed within 3 days!

Emboldened by our initial success, we added things we needed to shop for; a tea kettle with a broken whistle that was certain to melt into a puddle of steel when all of the tea water was long gone, was replaced within the week. We went whacky over wikis, and added a schedule of rides needed to the airport, and, during this busy holiday season, a list of the parties we're throwing. How come a wiki can inspire people to action that a year and a half of nagging could not? I think the wiki made visible and present to everyone what previously had just been some nebulous task that needed to be done someday. It also provided instant gratification for completing the task through automatically sending status updates out to the other peeps on the wiki when it was done. We even started thanking each other for doing things. Who knows where this all could lead! Maybe next we can use it to solve the unmatched sock problem in the laundry room . . .

Web Conferencing Tools - Online Support for Visually Engaging Meetings

Meeting support tools like GoToMeeting (Cheap!) and Dim Dim (Free!) enable everyone on a conference call to see a single shared desktop. Everyone gets connected by voice one way or another to hear what's going on, and logs in to the meeting location via a web browser so they can see what's happening on the shared computer screen. A status bar tracks who is attending, and chat capability compliments the verbal discussions. (People can actually follow a voice meeting and a simultaneous chat or two.) Info can be shared synchronously, and meeting highlights, decisions, and action items can be captured real-time in full view of everyone on the team.

Audience Response Systems - When Instant Gratification Isn't Fast Enough

At the Program for the Future event, instead of sitting back yawning through the drone of keynote speakers reveling in their own mastery of some obscure topic, the audience was engaged to weigh in on the biggest challenges we face as a species and the most promising routes to averting what sometimes seems like certain Armageddon. Within a matter of minutes our ideas were displayed for hundreds of participants to see, and we used little voting machines to prioritize the list. Actually solving the problems will take a little longer, but the priority ranking took less than 15 seconds. If it can work for an audience of hundreds I figure it could work for a project team. SMS text messaging using mobile phones removes the need for the special voting devices, and enables the same capability when people are not in the same location. I'm dying to have a geographically distributed team anonymously weigh in on topics during a teleconference from around the world!

Virtual Reality - One Your First Life Isn't Enough to Keep You Busy

I'm the first one to admit that I don't even have time for a first life, but I was finally inspired to try out qwaq, a virtual reality collaboration space similar to Second Life, but with a graphics card requirement that my soon-to-be-chucked-out-the-window PC can handle. My virtual world was a beautiful conference room with a deck overlooking the ocean, and my avatar was my perfect weight with no visible wrinkles. I was in project manager hog heaven! I fell in love with the possibilities I glimpsed in the 20 minutes or so I spent playing with this before I ditched it due to agonizingly slow response times. Jiminy Crickets, I'd have to take up smoking to have something to do while waiting for the program to respond to even the most basic request. I might have stood a chance if I were a gamer with the slickest hardware, or had access to the IBM Roadrunner (currently the fastest computer in the world according to a potentially reliable source). But with a mere business PC, I was doomed from the start. It's just too s - - - l - - - o - - - w. But, make no mistake, in my mind this is the way of the future, so keep your finger on the pulse of these tools.

You're Still Probably Doomed From the Start

Even with the coolest tools, collaboration is no easy matter. I recently volunteered to help at an event put on by a group of people committed to transforming the world for the better through collaboration. I was to lead a small group of other volunteers. The day started off with several people showing up late and others immediately abandoning their posts without so much as a "screw you" over their shoulders as they fled. The light of my hope for the world dwindled further as I witnessed an argument by a couple of so-called adults over something not worth raising an eyebrow over. Any illusion of the possibility of world peace completely evaporated when I tried to intervene and become the new target of one guy's verbal vengeance. I finally resorted to shouting to the dozens of school children who were watching him yell at me, "Don't watch this! It's not a good example of how to resolve conflict!"

Hope Grows Back

But that's the thing about lost hope, it grows back. So now once again I'm noodling on how collaboration tools can improve project execution and make a positive difference on planet earth. Getting groups of people to work together on the massive challenges facing our species is critical to the survival of the planet! I think it's time for a web-enabled consciousness conspiracy! Wanna join?

Scrappy Holidays! - Kimberly

*The original sentence has been edited after consultation with the author. -Ed. (Return to the edited sentence.)

The Power of Negative Thinking Project Management in Reverse

2008-10-14T10:01:44-07:00

by Kimberly M. Wiefling, M.S.

Most of my work revolves around the power of creating breakthroughs through extreme optimism and hideously positive thinking for which "hyperbole" simply isn't a big enough word. I frequently rant and rave about the hazards of know-it-alls who poo-poo every idea and wield their negativity like a scythe, cutting down anything new or imaginative in its path. But the popularity of negative thinking is undeniable, and, like most veteran project leaders, I'm a pro at it. I was reminded of this when I recently received a note from a guy I used to work for at HP who, after reading my book, mused, "It seems a bit cynical. Is that intentional?" Holy guacamole!* Yes, of course it's intentional! Any human being who's been a project manager for more than a couple of hours and hasn't become a tad cynical simply hasn't been paying attention.

Negativity for its own sake is an annoyance at best, and a soul-sucking experience similar to what I imagine a psychic vampire would produce. But in the right hands, it's a weapon of mass construction, freeing the mind of half-hidden dark thoughts, and an on-ramp to the superhighway of results in your project. Jump in, strap in, and hold on 'cause we're going to take the curves up on two wheels.

Negative Thinking is Easier, I'm Positive!

Perhaps due to some quirk of evolution and slight survival advantage (my apologies to the creationists out there), human beings seem to find it easier to think of things from a negative perspective. Don't believe anything I say, of course; check it out for yourself. Hustle an exhausted team working on a high-pressure project into a stuffy meeting room and ask them questions like:

What's working well on this project?
What could you do to work smarter, not harder?
How could we speed up the schedule?

Most likely you will be met with open-mouthed stares as your team struggles with their disbelief that you are serious, at least initially. If you're lucky, someone will take pity on you and mumble that they really like getting free sodas again now that the drought that followed the economic downturn of the first couple of years of the 21st century is over. (Of course, that crash could be dwarfed by the next economic downturn, who knows . . . sorry if I seem negative.) But unless you have a group of people picked straight out of "Pleasantville," you're likely to go from silence to violence pretty darn quickly. Stand near the door and be prepared to make your getaway!

Doom and Gloom Approach

Now put the same group of harried team members into a room, tell them you expect them to respond with at least one thing that would get you all fired if word got out, and ask them questions like:

What are the top three things preventing us from making changes that we KNOW will make us more effective on this project?
How could we guarantee that our schedule slips by at least a factor of two by the end of the project?
In general, what could we do to make this project much worse?

Now you are going to get some creative juices flowing! Be sure to cover the walls with flip charts because you're going to fill every one of them with ideas, comments, criticisms, and a few snide remarks. (And this is EXACTLY what you want if you want to improve your project's results. People are already thinking these thoughts, so you might as well get them out in the open.) Get people up at the flip charts scribbling furiously and egging each other on. Throw in a few playful doom and gloom comments of your own to get the ball rolling, and then encourage the negativity to soar to new heights, shouting out "Excellent! Awesome! More! What else! We are looking for the nuclear scenario, people!" from time to time if you can manage to be heard above the din. Give prizes for the most negative comments, like a year's subscription to "Skeptic's Weekly" or an "EASY" button reprogrammed to say, "That'll never work." Before you start, however, draw a line down the center of each flip chart and tell all of the peeps to post their comments only on the left side of the charts. The right side is for the next step in the exercise, which I recommend you keep secret until after you squeeze every bit of negativity out of their brains.

Reversals

Now you're ready for the next stage. In the world of innovation, the following technique is called "Reversals." It's a powerful approach to identifying and breaking free of unexamined assumptions and beliefs about reality and what's possible, and it's one of my favorite tools in what I call my "Impossibility Toolkit." Briefly, after listing ideas from a negative perspective on the left side of the flip chart, the reverse of each comment is posted on the right side. Naturally, you can group similar ideas together before doing the reversal to avoid duplication. After all, you're bound to have a few people independently come up with ideas like, "Add even more features to the product requirements even later in the project" and "Hold more time-wasting meetings like this one." (For those of you working virtually—and who isn't these days?—you can get a group brainstorm going on a shared spreadsheet laid out in a similar fashion either asynchronously or on a group brainstorm online.) You'll get good results if you follow these two rules: Keep it fun. Keep it real.

When you're done with the reversal you'll have something like this:

Master of Disaster Ideas	Reversals
Lots of email with dozens of CC'd people all responding endlessly back and forth on an urgent matter.	After 2 rounds of email ping pong pick up the phone, hold a quick teleconference, or call a meeting of the critical stakeholders to sort things out.
Avoid involving the customer and the end users in the development process.	Get feedback early and often from both the customer and the end user on early revs.
Keep piling more work onto already overloaded people and encourage them to multi-task excessively because everything is top priority.	Balance the workload across available resources, prioritizing ruthlessly so that people know what to work on next and can avoid the productivity losses of excessive multi-tasking.
Damage morale by getting people to help outsource their own jobs and then lay them off at the end of the project so you can do the work cheaper offshore.	Openly discuss the economic pressures facing the business and involve the team in developing ways to address the need to be profitable amidst increasingly global competition.
Allow scope creep and scope leap, but keep the same level of resources and schedule that were inadequate for the original scope.	Get the team huddled around the real business needs and business-driven requirements, like features and schedule. Once they understand the business and customer needs driving the tough constraints, enlist their support and reward their creativity in coming up with solutions that meet the business needs.

OK, you get the idea, right? This technique works in a wide range of situations, like when you need to figure out how to untangle some knotty technical conundrum or sort out some impending schedule train wreck. You can even use it to improve your personal life and your relationship with your family. One ProjectConnections staffer did this with her husband when house hunting. They made a list of every complaint they had about their apartment for the last 6 months. The reversal of that list—along with the things they did like—became their prioritized house "feature" list. When the dust settled, they basically had it all.

One aspect of this approach that I really love is that it taps the power of the group genius. I've been reading Wikinomics lately and, as a result, am even more convinced of the power of mass collaboration to overcome seemingly impossible obstacles. As Tapscott and Williams point out, effective collaboration requires a supportive framework. Just like the organizations applying these concepts to co-creation of encyclopedias (Wikipedia), video entertainment collections (YouTube), and collaborative innovation (InnoCentive), the freedom to create collaboratively thrives in a framework that provides support for the community. If we want to unleash the power of the group, we've got to create a safe environment that fosters individual contribution and collective creativity, and tools that enable these ideas to be shared freely, explored, examined, extended, expanded, and vetted. Collaboration grows out of the rich soil of such environments and wise project leaders don't leave this to chance.

How can we make sure that this idea dies on in your in-box? Do nothing! Or . . . in the spirit of Wikinomics and mass collaboration, how about taking action on one idea that you gleaned from this article and posting your experience and comments below? I look forward to hearing your thoughts. After all, none of us is as smart as all of us.

Collaboratively yours,

– Kimberly

*The original sentence has been edited after consultation with the author. -Ed. (Return to the edited sentence.)

PM Blog: Kimberly Wiefling

Suppressing Your Feminine Side May Be Bad for Business

Even If I'm Not Nurturing, Chances Are People Will Think I Am

Just Because You're Paranoid Doesn't Mean People Aren't Out to Get You

The Road to the Top Winds Uphill All the Way

The Coming Shortfall in Working Age Population in the Developed World

If Being More Nurturing Will Increase Project Success, Bring on the Nurturing!

Overcoming "Last Century" Thinking: Powerful Metaphors for What Happens in the Real World

Wholeness

Nonlinearity

Complex Adaptive Systems and Emergence

The Lens of Wholeness, Nonlinearity and Emergence

Kollaboration Is Killing Me

The Japanese Connection

The Volunteer Dilemma

There's No Place Like Home on the Wiki

Not So Wacky for Wikis, But Still Committed

What Worked Well

What Didn't Work

The Where, Who, and When of Risk Management

Documenting Your Demise

How Risky Does it FEEL?

When, Where, and Who Cares?

Surf's Up!

Measuring Success 1000 Years From Now

WHERE is the Risk?

Life's Not Fair

Risk Scope Creep

Clarity - The Cure for Muddy Thinking

Eat Your Spinach. It's Good for You

Having the Unpleasant Conversations You'd Rather Avoid

"Good Enough" Performance

What Unresolved Performance Situation is Tapping You on the Shoulder?

Run It Like a Project

Some Things Don't Stay Fixed

Here It Comes Again!

Coping with the Worldwide Economic Mood Disorderand Other Recurring Problems

Cross-Cultural Collaboration

Don't Let Your Attitude Make Problems Worse

Don’t Try This Alone! Whacky for Wikis and Crazy for Collaboration

Bringing a Knife to a Gun Fight

Whacky for Wikinomics

Skype - Reach Across the Ocean for Free

Wikis - Get Long-standing Home Repairs Done in Record Time

Web Conferencing Tools - Online Support for Visually Engaging Meetings

Audience Response Systems - When Instant Gratification Isn't Fast Enough

Virtual Reality - One Your First Life Isn't Enough to Keep You Busy

You're Still Probably Doomed From the Start

Hope Grows Back

The Power of Negative Thinking Project Management in Reverse

Negative Thinking is Easier, I'm Positive!

Doom and Gloom Approach

Reversals

Coping with the Worldwide Economic Mood Disorder
and Other Recurring Problems