The Dangers of Complacency

Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at [email protected]. Andy's new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.

  Career Development   Leadership  

I have been using chainsaws for well over 20 years. For 15 Canadian winters, our home and hot water were heated completely with wood that I processed from our property. That’s a lot of trees that I’ve handled.

There have been trees that got hung up in the branches of the trees around them, and there have been trees that didn’t fall where they were supposed to, but I’ve never really had any significant issues. A long time ago, I became comfortable with a chainsaw as a reliable tool.

That all changed a few months ago. I made a mistake. And while I got lucky, I’ll be limping for a few more weeks and I’ll have a four-inch-long scar in my leg to remind me that you can never let your guard down when working with chainsaws.

I’ve second-guessed myself a lot since it happened. And while I can accept that there was a lot of bad luck involved, I also have to acknowledge that familiarity with what I was doing led to me making some assumptions—to take for granted that things would go the way that they always had.

Why am I telling you all this? Well, I have no intention of letting my misfortune go by without finding an opportunity to write an article about how it relates to project management (you know me better than that!). And in this case, I think the lesson to be learned falls squarely in the career category.

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