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Honest Communication
Doug is the author of the landmark book, Extreme Project Management®: Using Leadership, Principles and Tools to Deliver Value in the Face of Volatility. He works with clients who undertake projects in very demanding environments: those settings that feature high speed, high change, high unpredictability and high stress. Doug has lived in the trenches—from Bethlehem, Pennsylvania to Beijing, China—with over 275 project teams with budgets that ranged from $25,000 to over $25 million. He is one of the founders of the Agile Leadership Network, an organization dedicated to connecting, developing and supporting great project leaders. He is known for his hard-hitting and humorous keynote speeches that address vital issues facing today’s project-based organizations. You can visit Doug at www.dougdecarlo.com.
It was Dr. Mignon Lawless, a psychotherapist friend of mine, who said to me, “You are only as sick as your secrets.” She was referring to clients who would keep traumatic and other unmentionable experiences and thoughts buried inside of themselves. In some cases, she said, their secrets have gone so deep into hiding that the individual is no longer aware of them. But that doesn’t mean they go away, she continued. Rather, they will find a way out of hiding by manifesting in the form of neurosis and psychosis, as well as physical illness.
I linked what Dr. Lawless said with a statement that Jim Lewis, a leading authority on project management, once made: “Projects are people.” If projects are people, then it must be true that a project is only as sick as its secrets.
In my experience, projects are often riddled with secrets that take the form of omissions, unmentionables, distortions or even outright lies. Just because these secrets are not out in the open doesn’t mean that they are not having an impact on morale and the project’s level of risk. People just seem to know that things are being covered up.
Here are a few popular examples of where one can find secrets:
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Schedule reporting: knowingly stating a rosier-than-true picture
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Cooking the books (e.g., playing accounting games …
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"Nearly every great advance in science arises from a crisis in the old theory, through an endeavor to find a way out of the difficulties created. We must examine old ideas, old theories, although they belong to the past, for this is the only way to understand the importance of the new ones and the extent of their validity." - Albert Einstein |