My brother and I LOVED baseball. We grew up in Oklahoma but we could watch Harry Caray on WGN or Bob Horner and the Braves on TBS just about every day of the week. We collected baseball cards. We bought the Beckett magazine that told you the value of a given baseball card. We were OBSESSED.

My mother came home from work one day. She gave firm instructions to my brother and me to clean our rooms. We were so into the baseball the game at the time we just let her orders bounce off our shoulders.

Five minutes passed.

She gave the same instructions. Again, we just looked at the TV.

What my mother did next took was astonishing. Here is the sequence of events that took place:

My mother literally took the following actions:

• Opened the back door
• Unplugged the TV
• Carried the TV to the back door
• Hurled the TV onto the concrete patio in the backyard
• Looked at us and asked us calmly to PLEASE clean our rooms

Shock and Awe
With the TV smashed into pieces in the backyard, my brother and I expressed a great deal of SHOCK and AWE. We were puzzled. We could NOT figure out how we went from watching the Chicago Cubs on TV to the last item in the sequence . . . our family television in pieces in the backyard. We just didn’t see the hints that took place between the questions from our mother and the TV in pieces.

It was no secret. The hints were there all along. My brother and I just chose to ignore them. BAD IDEA. In this case, really BAD IDEA. I think it took a few months to get another television into the house. We were at the mercy of our dad to pay for another one.

Was the result of the TV in pieces based on irrational thinking? Yeah, sure. But as a parent of three boys I can tell you that there are times that I FEEL like taking extreme measures, and sometimes you feel like your back is against the wall. I’m sure in that very moment, my mother didn’t think through all the options she had and went with the first one that popped into her head.

Stay Calm – and Pay Attention
I write about paying attention as a project manager. I also write about staying CALM under pressure. A very wise friend of mine uses the analogy of a duck. On the surface, a duck seems so calm, just out for a swim. But UNDER the surface is where the magic is happening, those webbed feet are killing it, always moving forward.

Here’s my point. Find the subtleties that are always happening. Open your eyes, ears, and heart.

The TV in pieces is certainly an extreme example, but I’ve seen a lot of projects end up shattered in pieces because the organization just didn’t SEE something coming.

In recent years, I took on a “salvage” role where I had the opportunity to “try” to turn around a multi-million dollar project.

I went into this project EYES WIDE OPEN, because its a widely accepted truth that project managers are not hired because things are running smoothly.

I knew something was OFF right away but could NOT, for the life of me, figure out what was going on.

Working Hard But …
The project teams were working feverishly toward a goal. This much was clear. The teams worked well together. They delivered system functions and features at an astounding rate. Where’s the harm in that, right?

Here’s what I noticed. Even though the team was performing quite well, I didn’t see ANY belief as to whether the work being done was going to help the company achieve its goals.

After working both in the trenches and with management for close to 2 months, it wasn’t until I started meeting with the executives on the project where it hit me like a coconut falling out of a tree and hitting me square on the head.

It was there ALL ALONG.I just couldn’t see it without the full picture. The executives were the final piece of the puzzle for me.

The GOAL from everything that I could see was to COMPLETE THE PROJECT. Executives were PUSHING the managers and teams to COMPLETE THE PROJECT. COMPLETE THE PLAN. EXECUTE THE PLAN. PUSH. PUSH. PUSH.

Guess what? That’s a fool’s goal.

Not My Fight
Picture yourself at a busy ski lift. If you apply pressure and PUSH all the people in the lift line toward the ski lift and expect the lift to go faster, you will fail EVERYTIME. In this example, the plan was to carry out a flawed plan. Once I found out that the executives were the clear culprit, I determined that a fight with the executives was not my fight to have at that time.

As a good hard-working professional, I did what I needed to do on this project to help move it forward. I got to the point that I always get to on projects where I take myself out of the day to day operations and let the team manage their work.

I was asked to stay and work for the company. I politely declined and found my next challenge. Why?

Because challenging yourself is the sweet spot where learning happens, that’s why.

My talents were being WASTED on someone’s flawed vision. The machine had been in motion for way too long prior to my arrival. I was in a hamster wheel that wasn’t adding value when it turned. Sure I got paid a lot to work on this project but folks it’s not about money. For me though, it’s about adding real value and making real change happen.

You can bet that I listened to my mother the next time she asked me to clean my room!

BIO:
Michael Stratton is the author of The Effective Project Manager. He blogs about next generation project management at effective-pm.com.  Contact him to get updates via email and he’ll send you a FREE chapter on Effective Email Communication for subscribing!