I was writing a review at Amazon this morning and I noticed that a book review I had written a couple of months ago had been listed as unhelpful. The book is good, I said it was good and yet someone didn’t like what I said. Ok, I can live with that. Since I have strong opinions, which I express at the drop of a hat, I’m used to people disagreeing. The problem with this situation was that there was something that struck me as being slightly off. After investigaging further it turned out that a single unhelpful vote had been logged against every review of the book.
This is the first time I’ve ever seen a drive-by shooting on a book review. I will never know what Dr. Brown did to upset this individual and I’m sure he will never know either since the person was too passive-agressive to even write a scathing review. The only thing they were capable of doing was indirectly saying “EVERYONE ELSE HERE IS WRONG”.
What’s all this got to do with PPM you might ask? The answer is drive-by shootings happen on projects and programs all the time. For years I tried to deal with these people directly (they’re stakeholders after all) but the problem is they don’t ever want what’s best for the project or for the company or for anyone else around them — they only want what’s best for them. One day I finally realized that it wasn’t possible to change their minds because of the psychological complexity involved. The bottom line was I simply couldn’t transfer power to them and that fundamentally was what they craved.
It took me a long, long time to learn the lesson these individuals had to teach but I finally got it. As stakeholders these people should be viewed as simple forces of nature. We all know the story of the frog and the scorpion, where the scorpion kills the frog in the middle of the river and both frog and scorpion die as a result. The punchline is that the scorpion simply couldn’t help himself.
For me there are two lessons in this situation. The first is the utter silliness of wasting one second trying to change the nature of a scorpion. The second is the lesson that even if it means the scorpion will still vote unhelpful on your “work” for the rest of his or her life you simply can’t afford to EVER let them too far into your project. How you make sure that others accept what you’re doing (by keeping that person at bay) is the measure of your political astuteness and nothing says there won’t be a price to pay but there isn’t any choice.
If this topic resonates with you, check out this article on game theory, the Prisoner’s Dilemma, and the Scorpion
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