Second rule of hole management, determine the depth.

Third rule of hole management, start filling in the hole.

These rules may seem rather obvious but have a look around…

     – How many people do you see practicing these rules?
     – How do you start practicing these rules?

Teams often get lost and forget that in addition to doing their work they need to practice some simple project management.  But once they have strayed away from the original plan they begin to improvise and create all kinds of work arounds.  Improvisation is so much more fun than structured work.  When improvising you get to be a hero, you get to rescue the project, bring it back from the brink and the people around you reinforce you for your great achievement.  This is hole digging behaviour.

If you don’t  agree with try the following; go find the original plan.  Often you will find that the plan is stale and out of date, the plan was never really a plan, or the plan never existed.  So if the plan really isn’t in good shape then get the team to stop what they are doing and assess the situation.  I often hear people saying, we can’t stop it would cost us too much time.  Hold on, I thought we just realised we were in a hole and needed to find a way out?

To assess the situation we must figure out what we are expected to deliver, then how much of it has been done & which bits are usable.  Now we can figure out how much remains to be done.  The other good bit about this type of exercise is we can determine how much longer we need in order to complete the remaining work.  If you think about it you know how much has been done, how long it took and how many people were involved.  This will give you a pretty good read on productivity.  Use that bit of data to re-baseline the programme.

West Wing – Season 2 Episode 10

This guy’s walking down the street when he falls in a hole. The walls are so steep he can’t get out. 

A doctor passes by and the guy shouts up, ‘Hey you. Can you help me out?’  The doctor writes a prescription, throws it down in the hole and moves on. 

Then a priest comes along and the guy shouts up, ‘Father, I’m down in this hole can you help me out?’  The priest writes out a prayer, throws it down in the hole and moves on. 

Then a friend walks by, ‘Hey, Joe, it’s me can you help me out?’   And the friend jumps in the hole.  Our guy says, ‘Are you stupid? Now we’re both down here.’ 

The friend says, ‘Yeah, but I’ve been down here before and I know the way out.’

We have seen this approach work time and time again and we have helped teams stop what they are doing, figure out where they are, how to recover and actually recover.  This has been done on projects that cost several hundred thousand of pounds and we have seen it done on multiple billion pound projects.

Slow down before you try to speed up.  If you stop and make the assessment you can find your way out of these holes.  Stopping to make the assessment also lets the team know that something different is possible.

PS.  If you keep digging at some point the hole gets so deep that the walls cave in on top of you.

I pushed them very hard using a technique called Socratic questioning.  I thought they might just tune me out at one point but they hung in there.  Looking back they said it helped them expand and strengthen their thinking.  They felt like they had advanced their idea.

I have seen many good ideas or plans that have not been passed through a lens of critical thinking.  In the process of getting the original idea down on paper and making a set of slides people fall in love with their work and feel like the job is done.  If you ask them critical questions they become defensive and this serves to protect the first pass of the idea.  They miss the opportunity to strengthen their thinking by engaging in some rigorous debate.

This is a sculpture by Rachel Whiteread that depicts the space the object does not inhabit, sometimes called the negative space.  What I was trying to help these entrepreneurs discover was their space beneath the stairs.   I believe they have a very interesting idea but the real discovery is still hidden.  They haven’t completed the critical thinking that will help them build something truly unique.

I first heard of the idea of the space beneath the stairs while listening to a recording of Charles Handy’s speech from it@cork.  In this talk Charles describes how entrepreneurs see the space beneath the stairs and that is what makes their ideas truly different.

I am a firm believer that without rigorous debate you won’t be able to create an environment that will support high performance.   The person doing the Socratic questioning can often be seen to be very threatening, aggressive or just plain negative.  To be able to engage in rigorous debate you have to have a trusting relationship with the other parties. 

My friend Howard and I often engage in these discussions.   During our most creative moments we use this technique to explore all kinds of ideas and improve the quality of our thinking.  Most of these discussions are held in the privacy of our offices.  On occasion we have invited other people to join in on one of these sessions.  As the questioning unfolds you can see a look of concern on their faces.  They are very worried that there is something wrong between Howard and I.  We have to explain to them that everything is ok.  Often we point to the finished product and say look, these are two fantastic ideas that we got out of the session.

I want to be clear that we aren’t yelling at each other.  The approach is more sophisticated than that; what we are doing is asking very intense, focused questions that are designed to probe and uncover our underlying assumptions and mental models.  We feel that to be at our best for our clients our practice sessions must be rigorous. 

The value we bring is helping others to see the space beneath the stairs.  They don’t see these spaces because they are too busy running up and down the stairs.

Why do I share this story? Well I figure my version of the future is going to come to pass. You see I believe that I can read the tea leaves.

How have I come to have this wonderful ability?  Well I have spent the last 7 years studying human behaviour. Am I an expert? No, just a hack.

I have read many research articles, journals and books. I have spent countless hours engaged in discussions about my findings with the practitioners, gurus, professors and sceptics. My studies of human behaviour tells me that you can objectively observe what is happening today and then use that data to predict, with a high degree of certainty, what will occur in the future.

The research shows that our behaviour is conditioned by our learning history, or the consequences to which we have been repeatedly exposed and the environment. Put another way, past behaviour is the best predictor of future behaviour.

His argument was that the management team is doing something different and thereby changing the environment. My observation, they are messing around in the green zone, haven’t got any where near The Action and are more interested in their political masters than the performance occurring down in The Action. The term for this type of person I believe is a bureaucrat.

These bureaucrats busy themselves with operational detail and therefore can’t possibility be acting in a strategic manner.  To be strategic you need to create some relaxed room in your head for critical thinking and application of Socratic questioning  to verify that you have a robust strategy.

Over dinner I made an observation that people in The Action believe this or that. He says nothing could be further from the truth. My question back to him is, “Who are your eyes and ears inside The Action? How do you get a true read on what they are thinking? Or what they perceive as reality?” He says this doesn’t matter.

I disagree; folks in The Action are great observers of these green zone bureaucrats. They listen to what the bureaucrats say and the watch what they do. The practitioners take this evidence, compare it to their history with these bureaucrats and draw conclusions about what the future will hold.

The green zone has taken it’s eye off the goal of creating an environment that will encourage high performance. The life in this lush green zone involves sun flowering to the political masters.

The practitioners find themselves enveloped in fog and sensing an impending storm they batten down the hatches. The bureaucrats look down upon this group and see non performance. They pass judgement, offer up a new prescription to cure the ills and everyone finds themselves in a self fulfilling prophecy of inevitable reorganisation.

So back to my original point…I can predict the future and the future is rosy right up until the point at which the truth can no longer be casually brushed aside with a dismissive scoff of “you don’t understand”.

Can the future be changed? Yes.

Is it going to be easy? No.

You can’t just take a pill, you have to eat less and exercise more if this is going to work.