Accelerating in the Wrong Direction

I got the team all fired up but marched them in the wrong direction,” Christi said, almost wincing as she spoke.

“And does that ever happen in the real world?” I asked her.

“Are you kidding? Never!” she said with feigned arrogance.

This was met with catcalls and howls of protest from the rest of the group.

“Well, almost never,” came her quick revision.

This quieted the angry mob.

“Tell us what happened,” I prompted.

She explained that at first she felt confused trying to make sense out of the minimal information on her instruction sheet. As she sat there, inactive and without direction, her confusion quickly morphed into irritation.

“You call these instructions,” she said to me, now recreating the irritation. “Listen to this: ‘You may exchange notes only with B’; ‘You will find five symbols below’; ‘You may not show them to any other person.’ There’s no goal here.”

At the bottom of this page are the symbols:

Christi told us that she immediately dashed off a note to Brenda asking, “What is the goal of this project?” Just as quickly Brenda shot back a reply: “I don’t know.”

“Now what was I supposed to do?” Christi said, exasperated. “I had no goal, and the only person I could communicate with was as clueless as I was. Meanwhile, valuable time was slipping away and nobody seemed to be taking any action.”

“Welcome to my world,” said Al.

“Sounds like you were pretty frustrated,” I said, addressing Christi.

“We were wasting time, and I felt totally out of control. I hate that feeling.”

“So what did you do?”

What she did was redefine the game in a way that enabled her to take control. This also made the uncomfortable feelings go away.

Christi decided that the exercise was intentionally pointless and was meant to test how quickly someone could generate and then mobilize the team around a self-selected goal. Since setting objectives and driving a team to complete them was Christi’s strong suit, she could now take decisive action. She immediately dashed off a note to Brenda that read, “Project goal: draw a circle around the square.”

With a goal in hand, Brenda got to work sending this information to the other members on the team.

“Al, what did you do when you received that message from Brenda? That must have been confusing given that you already had a different goal on your instruction sheet,” I said.

“You asked if there were any parallels with the real world. This is exactly what happens in our projects,” Al replied. “I’m told to do one thing and, no sooner do I get started than the priorities change and I’m told to do something else. Here’s what my instructions said: ‘You are to determine which one symbol is held by all five people on your team.’ Then I get this note saying the goal is to draw a circle around the square. What’s that about? Are there competing goals in this exercise? Was it a test to see how quickly we could respond to shifting priorities? Who knows? Meanwhile, we’re running out of time. If they said the goal was to draw a circle around the square, so be it. I’m just trying to be a team player.”

“Let’s follow the thread here,” I suggested. “The confusing instructions caused you to jump to your own conclusion about the goal of the exercise. This, in turn, confused Al. Confusion and miscommunication continued to cascade throughout the game much as it does in real projects. It’s the last thing we intend, yet something drives us toward this counterproductive behavior. Christi, what was it that caused you to jump the gun?”

“I got impatient and, without consulting anyone else, charged ahead with my own ideas about how to get things moving. Since everyone else had an essential piece of information necessary for the completion of the project, that was a big mistake.”

“It sounds like taking control, in this instance, came more at the expense of the team,” I commented. “Failing to balance control with an appropriate level of team participation gets many projects into trouble. Control has always been a low-quality, brute-force way to get things done. We could get away with this approach as long as we were driving people to complete relatively simple repetitive tasks; for such tasks compliance may be enough. But the warp speed world requires the creative intelligence and flexibility that come from commitment. We can force compliance, but we can only invite commitment.”

“This might be a good moment for me to jump in,” said Tom. “Unless, of course, I’m disrupting the process.”

“Not at all,” I told him.

“First, let me apologize to all of you for not being here to kick off the class this morning as I had intended. I got pulled into an emergency meeting the minute I walked in that only just ended.

“That’s what I want to talk to you about,” he continued. “I know there have been rumors floating around since the beginning of the year as to whether this department will continue. I was just told we’ve got six months to turn things around and make the case that we are worth more as an independent entity than we cost. If not, we go away.

“So I’m inviting your commitment. As I listened to this discussion, it occurred to me that maybe I’ve been making the same mistake you did, Christi. I’ve been trying to muscle things into shape. I’ve wanted to turn things around by a sheer act of will. Obviously, it hasn’t been working. I want to do everything in my power to enable us to succeed, but I can’t do it alone. We have a choice. We can either come together and succeed as a team, or we can refuse to change and fail individually.”

He paused and looked at them as if searching for that final, inspiring thing to say. I guess the silence was enough.

“Thanks for listening. I’ll let you get back to work,” is how Tom left it.

The applause that followed had an odd quality. On the one hand, I’m sure people appreciated Tom’s candor and integrity. They may have admired his determination to prevail. But there was also a certain awkwardness, like giving the doctor a standing ovation after he announces you only have six months to live.

“It looks like we’ve upped the ante, but the game is still the same,” I told them after Tom had left. “The more effectively we can clear the warp speed barriers, the greater our chance for breakthrough success. And the more squarely we can place ourselves at the root of those problems, the more quickly and dramatically we can change things. So what other parallels did you see between the project game and the real world?”