Best Practices, Frameworks, Fairy Tales and 5 Ways to Notice the Difference
Sometimes your business has a bad month. Sometimes your business has a bad quarter. Sometimes your business is losing money. Sometimes your business is going great, but something in it is not aesthetically pleasant. Sometimes you are stuck.
Substitute the word business in the above paragraph with life, department, government; you’ve been there.
That is where you start looking for external help. You read, post, call, ask, inquire, use all your networking arsenal and force your inner introvert to take a vacation.
Your first temptation arrives and it has an army behind it. Idea. The more you open your mind, the less immune it becomes. As Cobb in Christopher Nolan’s Inception movie would say: “What is the most resilient parasite? Bacteria? A virus? An intestinal worm? An idea. Resilient… highly contagious. Once an idea has taken hold of the brain it’s almost impossible to eradicate. An idea that is fully formed — fully understood — that sticks; right in there somewhere.”
Well, I almost started watching this movie again. Back to the point.
I remember how fascinated I was when I studied for my Project Management Professional (PMP) exam. As I read the PMBOK standard and rode the waves of multilevel processes with multidimensional links, my mind wandered sometimes. I beheld a world of noble elves, with golden project charters at the ready, passing up-to-date risk register, vigorously discussing stakeholder influence, building work breakdown structure out of mithril.
Another vision involved white walls, smiling double PhDs applying Six Sigma to titanium bubbles.
Nothing to do with the observable Universe.
Unfortunately, that is where the second temptation lurks. You want to bring the fantasy world to reality. It wants to become real. Your inner escapist takes over. That is how massive operational excellence, strategic alignment, framework implementation projects are born, huge consulting budgets are spent, multiple analysts are hired, sigmas are sixed… By the time things go wrong, you are into the new religion and you will take it to the bitter end, despising the heretics.
I am about to say one of the most obvious things ever. One size does not fit all.
I have developed a set of rules which help me calibrate and anchor back to reality, which I am going to share. I will limit it to the corporate world, however, these rules, when adjusted, can be used for other aspects of your life.
- Study the history of the framework. That is the easiest part to miss. Most people have no idea who, how and when put this to life. Ask one question: “Where did it really work before?”. Compare that to your industry and company. Are they compatible? A great example is applying waterfall project management principles to software development. What worked for a $1.5B aircraft, may not produce a half-decent smartphone app.
- Look for simple explanations. Simple enough to explain to a college fresher. Basically, try to understand how your solution is going to work around human imperfection. An example from call centre industry: managers are monitoring a random sample of customer calls and providing feedback to the employees? Why? There are many answers and most of those are right. The fundamental one is: you monitor your employees’ calls, thus your employees know that someone may be looking at how are they doing. Easy enough?
- Be extremely cautious about acronyms and terminology. That is probably the most underestimated danger. Terminology helps to isolate a group of professionals from laymen, or from other groups. Acronyms help to encrypt their talk. The more you indulge yourself into SG&A and PP&E, the less is the rest of your team connected with you, and the higher your tower of Babel is.
- Apply your projections to real people, not elves. Remember the elves with project charters? Well, they do not exist. Unlike those souls around you, who will either be affected, or influenced by, or even be executing your decisions. Look at someone you meet every day. Will they survive and be happy in the world that you are building? Try to walk in their shoes, at least for a few minutes.
- Do not get mesmerized by the beauty of the theory. Real world is often uglier than books. It is easy to become obsessed by and fall victim of blueprints, ideal processes, flawless formulas. Take Van Gogh’s picture and imagine yourself drawing it. Now, try to actually draw it. You get it.
These 5 are not testaments. Merely pieces of scattered advice. However, they may push you to break the shell of denial and look critically at your beliefs and direction. If these 5 help at least one person in the world re-think, change, and break free, I will become a better human being myself.
If not, I will re-read what I have written and think again.
