Commanding The Ocean

Isn’t it amazing, the concept of who is in control…or whether you have control at all? Working on projects and initiatives where people believe they can assert control over both the unknown and the vast complexities already at work let alone the future. In business and software it usually comes down to dollars and dates.

I prefer to think of projects or businesses as a ship on the ocean, especially during a storm. You have the means to make your way and the means to observe parts of the situation, but you are in no means in control. Have you ever heard “this must be done by end of the month/quarter/year, no excuses” or some variation of it? Of course you have. Agile methodologies are very aware of this. You’ve probably also heard the rebuttal “well, I can’t predict the future.” To which some adage about poor planning comes into play.

So what about operational issues that come up or micro-projects of assumed massive importance? Of course you have to address them, but…that shouldn’t affect the guarantees you already gave right? At least that is the common perception. A guarantee though is commonly placed in people’s minds as an absolute such that they file it away as fact instead of best educated guess. Guarantees are merely a backup promise…a plan B that hopefully you don’t have to exercise. “We guarantee 99.9% uptime, OR we refund X dollars” is a common SLA adage. The service will not permanently be online at least 99.9% of the time. Guarantees without the “OR” clause are either too painful to think of the plan B or it’s assumed it won’t actually be needed so no planning takes place.

Reality gets overlooked. Guarantees are guesses, not fact. Information regarding the future is guesses. Control over the actions of another person, like how business work is assigned from one to another, is decreed via persuasion typically by how much they care for their job and the work they do. Controlling nature/physics (aka environment), do I really need to comment on that one?

Now you are stuck with knowing the future (guarantees & info) is just a guess, an educated guess hopefully. Work done via others is solely based on how much they care and the environment (situation) rides on the balance of influence of the known versus all that is going on in the unknown.

Acting as if you can and do control the ocean just causes strife. It can become an act of pride which is usually balanced by a humbling result in time.

In the end, all you can do is push forward in the direction you choose with all you’ve got.

Originally published: 4/1/2013