A fleet of Athenian vessels forms a blockade at Syracuse. It's critical that they have the light of the moon to work and patrol. One fateful night however, there is a full lunar eclipse and half of the huge 130-ship fleet is destroyed by the Spartans.
The Greeks realized that knowing when eclipses were coming... well, that just might be important.
Flash forward to 1901. A sponge diver discovers a wreckage of a Roman ship which clearly was full of Greek artefacts when it sunk, at some point probably around 65 BC. Amongst the items in the wreckage is a small, laptop-PC sized chunk of corroded bronze metal which clearly is composed of gears. Lots of gears. Lots of very small, intricate gears that until that time, nobody thought the Ancient Greeks were capable of making. Some of these gears even had pin and slot and other sophisticated mechanical 'tricks' to account for the eliptical and changeable orbit of the moon. It's really quite an amazing device.
What drove them to invent this device, called the Antrikythera Mechanism, was a need for long-term planning. Turns out that this device was actually a sort of astronomical clock/computer which could forecast not only the timing of the eclipses (both solar and lunar) but even the colors and directions of shadow which would be seen on them. Pretty amazing stuff.
If you are interested in this story and the Antikythera Mechanism itself we strongly encourage you to watch this video and perhaps the entire episode of NOVA which covers the story (it's called 'Ancient Computer'). You may also like this video:
Our points here are simply these:
Necessity is the mother of invention... and disaster is the grandmother of invention
(In a related but little-known sub-theory from project management, scope creep is the 3rd cousin of invention, and contingency reserves are the crazy uncle of invention, but it turns out that the risk register is only a close friend)
The need to think long-term can be driven by disaster (such as melting ice caps, increasingly intense weather patterns, and so on) but it's better if it becomes routine and integrated into planning
Project managers - driven by the constraints of time, resources and meeting the immediate scope or their projects - are not prone to integrate long-term thinking into their projects
Taken together, the Antikythera Mechanism can serve as a symbol for you and your project. Did you think about the kinds of things that happen when your project is in its steady state? Have you thought at all about the product of your project while it is in operation? And - perish the thought - have you considered what happens to the product of your project when it is disposed of?
All of those should not be 'Greek to you'. We assert that they should be fundamentally part of your project planning process.
So - go out there and "gear up" for long-term thinking.
Stay tuned here and also visit EarthPM for more posts like this.
