Magic Key
April 19, 2000
6:30 a.m.
I was standing in the middle of a conference room. Fifteen people were looking at me, sitting in chairs around three tables arranged in roughly a "U" shape. The sound of the viewgraf machine hummed in the background. This is the company's project management course. I'm the instructor. A young man at the center table asked a question. "What do you do when you run into someone who won't give you the information you want?" "Tell me more," I said. "Well, what if you're trying to identify your deliverables, but your customer won't tell you what they want?" "Do you know why they won't tell you?" "No, why?" the young man asks, looking for an answer full of all-knowing wisdom. "You don't understand," I said. "I seriously want to know if you know why they won't tell you what they want?" "What do you mean?" "I mean are they unwilling because they don't have time to figure it out, or because they don't have enough data to give a good answer, or because they're just jerks and don't want you to succeed? I want to know if you understand their position." "All I know is that we've tried to get them to answer this since the beginning of the project, and they won't." "And you want me to give you the magic key?" He smiled. "Well..." I turned and walked around the room a little. This man wants me to say that sometimes people are a pain. He wants me to get tied up in personal dynamics, and in a sense prove the project management tools I'm presenting aren't overly useful because they're too hard to use. Oh, he wouldn't put it this way. But I've taught this class several times now. I've seen the type--very hard workers, nose to the grindstone guys with pagers that ring every half hour and eyes that run with bleary red splotches from the moment they wake up. I turned to the man. "Talk to me as if you are them." An expression of confusion crossed his face. "I want you to role play for a minute. Get into their head. Concentrate. Close your eyes if you have to. Then talk to me for five or six sentences as if you are them. Be truthful." I walked over and stood before him, then squatted to put his eyes at a higher level than mine. I motioned with my hand for him to continue. He couldn't, of course. "I don't know where to begin." Embarrassment was growing over him. He was getting the point--as was everyone in the room. I could tell they were by the edge to their silence and the angle of their heads and shoulders. "That all right," I said. I stood and put my hand to his shoulder, then nodded at him as I walked back to the front of the room. "That's all right." "This is the magic of project management," I said to the group. "Handling these types of situations is what makes us good. Still, a lot of people don't handle them well. But don't worry, not handling them doesn't really make us bad--it makes us just average." A nod or two came from the group. "Does anyone understand why I asked him to speak from his opponent's point of view?" The discussion spun in different directions from there. It was a good discussion. Lots of energy. Examples coming from two or three people. Then we moved to the next subject. In the end, the man who asked the question, I believe, understood that the problem here was that he didn't understand what the problem was, and so couldn't possibly fix it. But as we hit our next break, I thought about this exchange. I thought about the skill set I had used while it unfolded, the ability to see things from different angles, to understand motivation, to understand different people with different goals all supposedly working together and meshing into a single environment. I realized that during that split moment--that dead space of quiet time between the asking of the man's question and my brain's activity--I had exercised the muscle inside my thought process that I exercise when I run into a problem in my writing. This is the magic, I thought. This is the key.  But what about your budget, huh? Daily Persistence is © Ron Collins |
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