To Teach A PM: Dancing Bears

David Schmaltz is a project manager in Takoma Park, Maryland.

  Career Development   Knowledge Management   Lessons Learned   New Practitioners   ProjectsAtWork  

For any subject as personal as project management, it might make more sense to teach with mouth shut and to learn with mind open. Few experiences are more reassuring than discovering some universal principle for yourself and applying it to your project world. The Five-Minute Project Plan is an example.

Part One of this series — “The Insurgent Strategy” — told a story about how a couple of interested people managed to convene the workshop they wanted. Part Two — “The Dedication Test” — explored the importance of disappointing early and often as one means for creating delightful results. This third part proposes teaching with mouth firmly shut.

The Executive Director of the executive project management program explained to me that modern education combines entertainment with instruction. “Edutainment,” he a-little-too-enthusiastically called it. In that moment, I channeled James Thurber, certain that I was being served a heaping helping of boiled spinach. “I say it’s spinach, and I say the Hell with it!”

I’d sat through almost two days of so-called edutainment, watching not only the effect on the edutainers, but also on the yawning crowd whose companies had paid tens of thousands of dollars for their best and brightest to attend. The edutainers, notables to a person, resembled nothing …

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