Stalking Project Killers

 

I remember an English class I took when I was doing my undergraduate work, where the professor quipped that there is no record of a written language prior to around 3600 B.C., but at around that time there was a veritable explosion of languages recorded in various media.

“So, theoretically, the story of the Tower of Babel could be true” I suggested.

He chortled condescendingly as only professors of the humanities from state universities can, but essentially agreed with my point.

Some years later I was watching a documentary on ancient Babylon, where some archaeologists had unearthed a rudimentary battery, and dated it to around 3500 B.C.  The analyst being interviewed speculated that, had mankind pursued that technology back then, we would today be hopping galaxies in starships. Of course, he had no way of knowing that, but the speculation was fascinating. Could it have been another hint that the story of the Tower of Babel was not completely allegorical?

For those who are not familiar with Genesis 11, all of the people had moved to the valley of Shinar, and decided to launch a very big project, indeed. They were going to build a city for themselves that included at least one tower that would reach to the heavens. God came down, saw it, and said “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.” (NIV). Well, that did the trick: they stopped building the city, and scattered themselves all over the Earth.

What we have here is an example of the Almighty derailing a project. Of course, we humans are pretty good at doing the same thing, but I think it’s instructive to observe how He did it. He confused their language. Why would this spell automatic doom for the Tower project? While the designers, engineers, and laborers no doubt spent a lot of time using their common language to make crude jokes and compare the statistics of ancient sports teams, it’s obvious that critical information could no longer be understood by the project team, making coordinated work or progress against desired scope impossible.

Don’t misunderstand – I do not agree with the so-called communications experts who insist that, if we could just perfect our methods of communication, the management world would be all glitter and unicorns. But I do believe that, should pathologies in the business model creep into the performing organization, the earliest place it will manifest will be the avenues of communication.

I define “office politics” as those instances where members of the organization behave in a manner that is inconsistent with (or even contrary to) the stated goals of that organization, but benefit them personally. Since that definition would also include theft, let me hone it down a little further: they do so by manipulating the information streams on which the organization depends.

Take the favorite tactic of the Maccoby archetypical Jungle Fighter: they magnify their rivals’ (virtually everybody around them) failings, while minimizing their own. They amplify their accomplishments, while trivializing their rivals’. If the organization does not depend on the information shared informally among team members, this is fairly insignificant . However, if this information stream is acted upon by management, then the poorest decision-makers advance at the expense of the truly talented members of the project team.

Consider also those who tamper directly with the management information stream. Our friends, the accountants, and risk managers leap directly to mind. By vastly overstating their techniques’ efficacy, and advancing them, they elbow aside more legitimate sources of valid management information, significantly increasing the chances that poor management decisions will be made.

Relevant, timely, and accurate information is the life-blood of any organization, and its reliable conveyance is often easily manipulated by the project-killers in your ranks. And such ones will rarely self-identify by wearing hockey goalies’ masks.