My Head Is Too Small.

 

We all have our own little tricks to remember things. Lets be honest, there is just too much information thrown at us to fit in our heads.

Our heads are just too small.

I write a lot about seeing projects as temporary tribes that go through some unknown country on some Big Adventure. It's almost hard to admit, but that is basically how my brain handles the concepts of projects, change in organizations and temporary collaboration.

It's the analogies with explorers making contact with foreign tribes, using tents, or sukkahs, as supporting structure for working in foreign environments, looking at rituals and procedures as flags that tribes carry around to identify themselves.

I am not making these things up just for entertainment. It's how I deal with complex matters myself.

Analogies and associations help us crunch information so it doesn't take up so much space in our brains.

Narratives compress information for storage.

This is one of the main points Nassim Nicholas Taleb makes in his book "The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable” that I completely missed the first time I read it. At least I can't remember it. I reread the book recently and was almost screaming to myself: "Yes. Yes. This is it!".

What I got from it the first time around was his point about the human need to categorize everything. We have to put the world around us in neat boxes. Taleb coins the term “Platonicity” for this phenomenon — “the focus on those pure, well-defined, and easily discernible objects like triangles, or more social notions like friendship or love, at the cost of ignoring those objects of seemingly messier and less tractable structures.”

We put a label on an event and use that knowledge to reason about the future. We use this mechanism on everything, including people.

But it is not only labels. It's narratives and stories as well.

For me The Wizard of Oz analogy to stakeholder management is a awesome narrative that helps me to remember many important aspects.

Of course, when using analogies, narratives and associations we are simplifying reality and might be missing important details. But other than awareness, and engaging situations mindfully I am afraid there is nothing much we can do about it.

Answering the project questions "What does done look like?". "How do we get there?" and "How do we know how far we are?" are not just technical, planning and metric questions. It's even more important to see it is the elements for the project narrative.

Treating them as technical questions might even scare some important people away. Not everyone gets all fired up from Project Management concepts.

But everyone is up for a good story.

 

Bas de Baar is a writer who draws about people in transition. He loves to make visual maps and travel guides for the collaborators of our brave new world.