Baseball Bat Donuts!

 

This is going to be one of the strangest combinations of topics you’ve ever seen in a post about project management.  I think it will be worth it.  Read on.

It combines two seemingly unrelated things to convey the idea that you – as a PM – should be exercising your long-term thinking.

We start with a baseball bat donut.  A what?  Well, first of all, whether you’re from the US, Japan, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Korea, Taiwan, the Netherlands – any of the countries that tend play or at least enjoy the sport of baseball (or honkbal if you are Dutch), you know that the batter stands in and tries to hit a thrown ball from a pitcher.  Major league pitchers throw the ball at speeds up to 100 miles per hour (about 161 Km/hour).  So if you are a batter who wants to practice for those high-speed pitches, you swing a bat which is a little heavier.  How do you make a bat heavier?  You slip a weight – in the shape of a donut – on the barrel of the bat (see photo) and take practice swings, to help your muscle ‘memory’ get used to the heavier bat, so when you take OFF the weight, you are swinging with more speed.

From Wikipedia: A baseball doughnut is a weighted ring that fits over the end of a baseball bat, used for warming up during a baseball game. A doughnut is thought to help increase bat speed. Doughnuts can weigh as little as 4 oz. and as much as 28 oz. Players feel baseball doughnuts increase bat velocity because after warming up with a baseball doughnut then decreasing the weight after taking the doughnut off, the swing feels faster.  The heavier load of the weighted bat stimulates the neural system and increases muscle activation during lighter bat swings. Researchers have found that muscle contractions are stronger after reaching near maximal loads. One research study also found that additional weight added to the bat may strengthen the muscles of the forearms and wrists.  

The doughnut was created by former New York Yankees catcher Elston Howard. Interestingly, Howard, in 1955, was the first African-American player on the Yankees' roster, but later played on the Boston Red Sox.

So keep the baseball donut in mind as you read the rest of this post.  Stay with me now.

I’ve been talking for a long time about long-term thinking in projects.  At EarthPM, we have published two books on the topic.  What we mean about long-term thinking is thinking through – that is past the end of your project to that time when the project’s outcome is in its ‘steady state’.  So if your project is a bridge, you are thinking about the maintenance of the bridge, the traffic going over the bridge, the need to paint it every so often.  If your project is a piece of software that operates machinery you are thinking not only about whether or not the software “works” once, but whether or not it operates the machinery efficiently in terms of power usage.

That takes mental ‘muscle’ for a PM.  We are trained to think about our project's outcome – and we are motivated to move on to our next project.  We are “get ‘r done” people.  And yet, I am urging you to think long-term.  Not always a pleasant thing to do for PMs.  Maybe what we need is a donut.  No, not the fattening kind – the baseball kind.  Remember, we just talked about this a few moments ago.  Come on, stay with me!

So here it comes – your long-term-thinking baseball donut.

If you are having trouble extending your thinking in terms of years, slip on this mental baseball donut – try thinking in terms of eons – then years become elementary.  In this recent article from “Cosmos & Culture”, in turn from the USA’s NPR (National Public Radio), author David Grinspoon (@drfunkyspoon) discusses the various eons that the Earth has gone through – Hadean, Archean, Proterzoic, and what we’re in now – Phanerzoic.  So next time someone asks you what time it is, just say, “oh, about quarter past the Phanerzoic”.  It’ll make you a hit at the holiday party.  Well, I suppose that depends on what sort of party you're attending...

 From the article:

From a systems perspective, the early stages of this transition are highly unstable because global influence precedes global control. Such a system is characterized by unstable positive feedbacks which threaten catastrophe. Hence the dangers of our current "Anthropocene dilemma": We have global influence without global self-control. However, global technological influence clearly contains both peril and promise. Conscious awareness and control can also be sources of stabilizing negative feedback. This merely requires recognizing a problem and acting to fix it.

We've done this with our, so far, successful efforts to repair the ozone layer. There are pathways by which this stabilizing cognitive phenomenon could become a very long-lived and even permanent part of the Earth system. This would require that we reach a stage where we have a deep understanding of nature and an ability to forestall natural disasters, as well as the deep self-understanding necessary to forestall self-imposed disasters. In other words, it will require both technical and spiritual progress.

How does this affect the way we view our future? It reframes our task. And it puts our immediate challenges over the next century, stabilizing population and devising an energy system that can provide for the needs of this population without wrecking the natural systems upon which we depend, against the backdrop of a much longer-term challenge. Once we get over the relatively short-term, century-scale threat of destabilizing fossil-fuel induced climate change, we need to learn how to become a long-term stabilizing factor on the planet. This will include: over the next several hundred to thousand years, asteroid and comet defense; over the next several tens of thousands of years, learning how to prevent ice ages and natural episodes of dangerous global warming; over several billions of years, compensating for the warming sun and preventing the inevitable runaway global warming that will otherwise result from solar evolution.

See what I did there?  Grinspoon just called ‘getting over climate change’ - something we think about as a huge, huge, and important problem, a ‘relatively short-term, century-scale threat’.  Using that measure (think baseball donut) of centuries as trivial ticks of a clock, a few years is like an instant… a blip.  When he says “long-term” – he is serious.  Given this definition – that is, after swinging the bat with Grinspoon’s Donut (maybe we should jointly trademark that!), it should be  really easy to think about our project’s product, say, 10 years from now.  Right?

There’s a lot to the article so I’d like to insist that you take an even smaller instant to read it, and note that the author (Grinspoon, not me) has a new book out called, “Earth In Human Hands – Shaping Our Planet’s Future”.  Just grab a donut, and read the article!