A Project's Sound Of Music
Projects tend to be, you know, how to say it, madhouses. A loose collection of people calling same things differently, broadcasting industrial loads of ambiguity, misunderstandings, and of course bad diagrams. There is a dose of intentional deception, power struggles, and egos galore. Nothing that wouldn’t happen in the best families.
In project life, very often you find yourself having to politely listen and observe someone putting forth the most wrongly-thought thoughts ever, only to be unable to speak your mind just because of the reigning social rules preventing you from offending the person who is shamelessly offending you with their half-baked thinking. We seem to have evolved this weird social code when pointing out that someone is wrong might be interpreted as being rude. Fun times. I wonder if we can track this behavior back to our hunter/gatherer ancestors when our distant grandpas would screw up setting a trap for a rabbit and his hunting mate would scold him profusely which would make grandpa so offended that his attention would divert badly and it would decrease the chances of the next kill even further. Being easily offended might be an evolutionary trait for survival after all1.
But projects are nothing like hunting rabbits. Think of projects more like orchestra ensembles, with the difference that most of the musicians are holding instruments they have never played before and they must learn to play as they go. The result? Something like this:
In the orchestra-like analogy of projects, people are sometimes given solos when they can barely handle the thing. Here you can see the equivalent of a recently-hired junior project manager trying to organize and front an “all-hands” meeting:
A while ago, astronomers discovered that pressure waves sent out by a black hole caused ripples in the cluster’s hot gas that could be captured and translated into sound. This process is called sonification—that is, the translation of astronomical data into sound. Now think of all the black holes, I mean, projects you are part of or you’ve been part of, and think what kind of sound those projects would produce if you could sonify them. Unsettling, huh? Does it sound like a broken washing machine to you as well?
Now, imagine your projects again as orchestras and try to visualize your colleagues taking part of the different sections:
Piano: the individualist guy who enjoys always being on his or her own. “This is my instrument and only I am allowed to touch it” kind of attitude. Geez.
The violins section: populated with the annoying ones, always with that high pitch that can be heard from across the hallway
The brass: populated with those from whom is always hard to understand what they’re up to, because what their fingers are doing is not exactly what you hear
The one hitting the cymbals: that guy who barely shows up or talks in calls but only unmutes to ask an unrelated and incredibly annoying question to make sure everyone can acknowledge his presence. Manager material.
But every now and then, amongst the surrounding dissonant chords, an oasis emerges: the sound of what appears to be a clear mind. It is a sweet, rich, angel-like sound. You feel somewhat confused, almost hypnotized: he or she happens to come with a critical mind; you hear something that sounds like competence and critical thinking. This new person appears to be able to articulate well the ideas they want to convey. Is this heaven? Is that bright thing actually light at the end of the tunnel? Am I dead? Let me hear a bit more, just to be sure:
Well, damn. Another false alarm.
Before you feel offended, this paragraph is not based on any real evidence about the anthropological relationship between rabbit hunting and emotional sensitivity