Guessing is not a strategy: How to build decision velocity with AI and real-time data
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Irrational Requirements
David Schmaltz is a project manager in Takoma Park, Maryland.
Why do lottery winners end up feeling miserable? Many project managers know the awful truth. When we robotically deliver what our clients and stakeholders think will make them happy, we conspire with them to leave both of us miserable. Wishes are not requirements, which are both more complicated and inevitably more ambiguous.
Last year, I read a mild best-seller entitled Stumbling Upon Happiness. The author, a Harvard psychologist, sought to answer the question, Why does winning the lottery make the winner miserable? Indeed, his research clearly demonstrated that almost everyone who wins a lottery ends up feeling miserable as a result. People still seem to buy a lot of lottery tickets, though.
We buy lottery tickets because we mistake our imaginings about winning the lottery for the harsher realities that winning brings. We don’t imagine ourselves anonymously moving like a stool-pigeon mobster under witness protection to avoid needy relatives, or finding our mailbox overflowing with plaintiff requests for surgery money from the parents of innocent, dying children. We imagine doing exactly what we’ve always wanted to do with our winnings, but the obligations that come with great wealth usually overwhelm the ability to choose to do what we always aspired to do. And often, as my Mother’s uncle discovered when he retired to Mexico, we find that our dream-…
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"A doctor can bury his mistakes but an architect can only advise his client to plant vines." - Frank Lloyd Wright |