About Obi-Wan’s “Point Of View”

 

Towards the beginning of the motion picture The Return of the Jedi, Luke Skywalker, having just witnessed his mentor Yoda pass away peacefully, has a chance to confront his original tutor, Obi-Wan Kenobi. Luke had a right to be put off – he had learned at the end of The Empire Strikes Back that his antagonist, Darth Vader, was, in fact, his father, even though Obi-Wan had told Luke in the first movie, Star Wars (later renamed A New Hope), that Vader had “betrayed and murdered” Luke’s father. When Luke confronts the holographically-represented spirit of Obi-Wan with this jarring inconsistency, Obi-Wan begins his defense with the immortal words “”Luke, you’re going to find that many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our own point of view.”

To which Luke replies, incredulously, “A certain point of view?”, a line delivered by actor Mark Hamill as if to imply “is that really the best defense the writers could come up with for this massive plot reversal?”

Of course, the character of Luke had every right to be incredulous at this turn of the narrative. Yes, the revelation that Vader is Luke’s father is considered to be one of the most astonishing reveals in all of cinema history, but there’s a reason for that: nothing, and I do mean nothing, in the dialogue of the previous two films offered up the remotest hint that Vader and Luke were even related, much less father-and-son, prior to Vader’s infamous line to the contrary. And, as Luke pointed out, Obi-Wan had told Luke a very different story about what happened between Anakin Skywalker and Darth Vader. And now that complete reversal was to be somehow explained using the “point of view” defense?

Riiiiiiight.

Meanwhile, in a galaxy very, very close to ours, and a few short minutes ago,

ProjectManagement.com’s theme for June, Lessons Learned, got me to thinking about how narratives are formed and then documented, and how sometimes these narratives are inconsistent with the facts. A few examples:

• Senator Joe McCarthy never wrongly accused anyone of being a communist or communist sympathizer.
• Kirk never said “Beam me up, Scotty”, and Lassie never saved Timmy from a well.
• Julius Caesar was never emperor of Rome (he was assassinated the morning the Senate was to vote him that title and those powers).
• There is absolutely no evidence that Marie Antoinette ever said of starving Frenchmen, “Let them eat cake.”
• Richard III was only 32 years old when he died at the Battle of Bosworth Field, and never said “A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!”

I could go on (and often do), but you see my point. These narratives take on a life of their own, and any hard data that challenges (or even overturns) them is ignored or disputed.

This being the case, what are the chances that your organization’s lessons learned documents flawlessly reflect the precise nature of the causal elements of its previous project successes and failures?

I would guess the answer to that is “pretty darn low.”

Can “Point of View” factors even be quantified?

 It’s been my experience that the people who prepare such documents can’t even articulate the difference between proximate cause and material cause, let alone in the highly complex/near chaotic environs where Project Management actually happens.  The Big Apple website has a list of the six phases of a project (which were probably originally developed in the early 1970s):

1. Enthusiasm
2. Disillusionment
3. Panic
4. Search for the guilty
5. Punishment of the innocent
6. Praise and honor for the non-participants

Since almost all humor must have at least a little bit of truth in it, and since most PMs I know would find this list at least a little bit funny, ask yourselves:  why are numbers 5 and 6 funny? Could it be that it’s a common foible of human nature to mis-remember what actually happened in a given project’s history to promote a narrative at variance with the facts?

If the answer to the previous question has even a possibility of being “yes,” then my readers should keep something in mind: that moment at which you are in the Project Management-equivalent position of being on a narrow ledge above an abyss, with your ultimate adversary preventing any apparent escape or remedy, is a really bad time to learn that key assertions from your organization’s lessons learned documents may be 180 degrees out-of-phase due to “a certain point of view.”