13

2
Playing the Project Game

I knew Al was only half kidding about his fifteen-minute time limit. In the warp speed world, people want everything to be instant except the coffee. So we got right down to business.

“The purpose of this game,” I reminded the group, “is to see if we can catch ourselves in the act of creating the very frustrations we identified as standing in the way of our success. Although the game lasts only fifteen minutes, I have attempted to simulate as many real-world conditions as possible.

“For example, take the wide geographical distribution of project coworkers. We will pretend that you must actually coordinate your work over great distances. Therefore, you will not be able to communicate verbally but must use e-mail, which we will simulate by passing handwritten sticky notes.”

I then showed them the seating diagram on the next page to explain who could communicate with whom.

Al rolled his eyes. I sensed that he was not thrilled with the pace of the experiment so far.

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“Once again, to make this as much like actual working conditions as possible,” I continued, “I’m going to interrupt your work every five minutes so that we can have a status review meeting.”

A number of people, including Al, chuckled ruefully over this line. This was his kind of humor. I explained that, at five-minute intervals, I would ask them to tell me what percent of the project they believed was complete—a practice that mirrored their real-world behavior.

I then asked them each to sit in the chair corresponding with the first letter of their names. In other words, Al sat in chair A, Brenda in B, Christi in C, and so forth. When they were seated, I gave them each an instruction sheet and asked them to begin the first five-minute round.

As they began, a giant quietly slipped into the room. He looked like he could have played center in the NFL and obviously planned on sticking around for a while, so I walked over and introduced myself. That’s how I met Tom Costello, Christi’s boss. He had dropped by to observe the class. I quickly filled him in on the basics of the game and then tried to give him a feeling for the challenges posed by the exercise.

“The first thing you should know,” I told him, “is that team members often begin by assuming the instruction sheets they have been handed are all the same. This is not true. Everyone does receive a set of five different abstract shapes (circles, arrows, squares, and so forth). But only Al, sitting in the A chair, knows that the project goal is to find the one shape all five team members hold in common. The other instruction sheets simply say, ‘Here are your symbols.’ As a result, Brenda, Christi, Dave, and Ellen will probably spend the fifteen minutes busily passing notes and exchanging information with no idea what they ultimately are trying to accomplish.”15

“I wouldn’t be surprised if some of them find that experience painfully similar to their real jobs,” said Tom. “I know a number of folks in Christi’s group respond to the enormous time pressure we all work under by resisting all planning efforts. When the consequences of that choice hit them, they act as if they’ve been tricked and offer a number of different theories as to who it is that’s tricked them.”

“They’re not alone,” I told him. “It’s difficult for any of us to see the unintended outcomes of our own behavior. Making those outcomes easily visible is exactly what this game was designed to do.”

“How does it do that?” Tom wanted to know.

“Well, there’s a short answer and a long answer.”

“Let’s start with the short one,” he said.

“Speed forces us to respond automatically,” I told him. “Most preprogrammed behavior comes laced with flawed assumptions that generate costly consequences. This game exposes those assumptions so we can make better choices.”

“Interesting,” he said in a somewhat noncommittal tone of voice. “And the long one?”

“If you’d be willing to wait until the end of the exercise, the discoveries that result would be the most powerful way to provide you with that answer. Forgive me if that leaves you feeling a bit up in the air, but keep in mind that you already have more information about the rules and objectives of this game than any of the players have received. Still, as you try and understand their experiences, you may feel a sense of confusion,” I cautioned him. “Even though you know the goal of the exercise, exactly what people are trying to accomplish may seem unclear. You may wonder who’s supposed to be doing what. This is precisely what Christi and her team are asking themselves as they play. This confusion is the root cause of what we’ve been calling ‘warp speed poisoning.’”

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“Fair enough. Let’s wait and see what happens,” Tom said.17

At the conclusion of the game, I gave them a few minutes to talk with each other and compare notes. “Look at each others’ instruction sheets,” I told them. “Find out what was going on and what got in the way.”

As they figured out that only Al knew the goal of the exercise, the volume of the conversation rose. Why hadn’t he told anyone else? He countered by asking why they failed to follow his simple instructions. When the accusations had subsided, I interrupted their conversation to make the following point.

“I have played this game for over a decade in every conceivable type of organization. I want you to know that there is no mistake you have made that does not occur every time this game is played. These are not personal or organizational failings you have discovered. You have encountered a blind spot in our makeup as human beings.”

To help us learn more about this blind spot, I asked if they noticed any parallels between what happened in the game and their experience in real-world projects.

Accelerating in the Wrong Direction

I got the team all fired up but marched them in the wrong direction,” Christi said, almost wincing as she spoke.

“And does that ever happen in the real world?” I asked her.

“Are you kidding? Never!” she said with feigned arrogance.18

This was met with catcalls and howls of protest from the rest of the group.

“Well, almost never,” came her quick revision.

This quieted the angry mob.

“Tell us what happened,” I prompted.

She explained that at first she felt confused trying to make sense out of the minimal information on her instruction sheet. As she sat there, inactive and without direction, her confusion quickly morphed into irritation.

“You call these instructions,” she said to me, now recreating the irritation. “Listen to this: ‘You may exchange notes only with B’; ‘You will find five symbols below’; ‘You may not show them to any other person.’ There’s no goal here.”

At the bottom of this page are the symbols:

Christi told us that she immediately dashed off a note to Brenda asking, “What is the goal of this project?” Just as quickly Brenda shot back a reply: “I don’t know.”

“Now what was I supposed to do?” Christi said, exasperated. “I had no goal, and the only person I could communicate with was as clueless as I was. Meanwhile, valuable time was slipping away and nobody seemed to be taking any action.”

“Welcome to my world,” said Al.

“Sounds like you were pretty frustrated,” I said, addressing Christi.19

“We were wasting time, and I felt totally out of control. I hate that feeling.”

“So what did you do?”

What she did was redefine the game in a way that enabled her to take control. This also made the uncomfortable feelings go away.

Christi decided that the exercise was intentionally pointless and was meant to test how quickly someone could generate and then mobilize the team around a self-selected goal. Since setting objectives and driving a team to complete them was Christi’s strong suit, she could now take decisive action. She immediately dashed off a note to Brenda that read, “Project goal: draw a circle around the square.”

With a goal in hand, Brenda got to work sending this information to the other members on the team.

“Al, what did you do when you received that message from Brenda? That must have been confusing given that you already had a different goal on your instruction sheet,” I said.

“You asked if there were any parallels with the real world. This is exactly what happens in our projects,” Al replied. “I’m told to do one thing and, no sooner do I get started than the priorities change and I’m told to do something else. Here’s what my instructions said: ‘You are to determine which one symbol is held by all five people on your team.’ Then I get this note saying the goal is to draw a circle around the square. What’s that about? Are there competing goals in this exercise? Was it a test to see how quickly we could respond to shifting priorities? Who knows? Meanwhile, we’re running out of time. If they said the goal was to draw a circle around the square, so be it. I’m just trying to be a team player.”20

“Let’s follow the thread here,” I suggested. “The confusing instructions caused you to jump to your own conclusion about the goal of the exercise. This, in turn, confused Al. Confusion and miscommunication continued to cascade throughout the game much as it does in real projects. It’s the last thing we intend, yet something drives us toward this counterproductive behavior. Christi, what was it that caused you to jump the gun?”

“I got impatient and, without consulting anyone else, charged ahead with my own ideas about how to get things moving. Since everyone else had an essential piece of information necessary for the completion of the project, that was a big mistake.”

“It sounds like taking control, in this instance, came more at the expense of the team,” I commented. “Failing to balance control with an appropriate level of team participation gets many projects into trouble. Control has always been a low-quality, brute-force way to get things done. We could get away with this approach as long as we were driving people to complete relatively simple repetitive tasks; for such tasks compliance may be enough. But the warp speed world requires the creative intelligence and flexibility that come from commitment. We can force compliance, but we can only invite commitment.”

“This might be a good moment for me to jump in,” said Tom. “Unless, of course, I’m disrupting the process.”

“Not at all,” I told him.

“First, let me apologize to all of you for not being here to kick off the class this morning as I had intended. I got pulled into an emergency meeting the minute I walked in that only just ended.

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“That’s what I want to talk to you about,” he continued. “I know there have been rumors floating around since the beginning of the year as to whether this department will continue. I was just told we’ve got six months to turn things around and make the case that we are worth more as an independent entity than we cost. If not, we go away.22

“So I’m inviting your commitment. As I listened to this discussion, it occurred to me that maybe I’ve been making the same mistake you did, Christi. I’ve been trying to muscle things into shape. I’ve wanted to turn things around by a sheer act of will. Obviously, it hasn’t been working. I want to do everything in my power to enable us to succeed, but I can’t do it alone. We have a choice. We can either come together and succeed as a team, or we can refuse to change and fail individually.”

He paused and looked at them as if searching for that final, inspiring thing to say. I guess the silence was enough.

“Thanks for listening. I’ll let you get back to work,” is how Tom left it.

The applause that followed had an odd quality. On the one hand, I’m sure people appreciated Tom’s candor and integrity. They may have admired his determination to prevail. But there was also a certain awkwardness, like giving the doctor a standing ovation after he announces you only have six months to live.

“It looks like we’ve upped the ante, but the game is still the same,” I told them after Tom had left. “The more effectively we can clear the warp speed barriers, the greater our chance for breakthrough success. And the more squarely we can place ourselves at the root of those problems, the more quickly and dramatically we can change things. So what other parallels did you see between the project game and the real world?”

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Confusing Tasks and Goals

“You know, given that we’re in a fight for our survival, I think I spend a lot of time doing nonessential activities,” said Dave. “At least, that’s the way it appears to me. But I don’t really know because I’m assigned tasks without context. That’s exactly what happened in this game. Nobody ever told me the goal. I went through the entire project without ever knowing what we were trying to accomplish or why.”

“Was this true for anyone else?” I asked the group.

“Everyone except Al,” said Brenda. “He was the only one who knew the goal, but he didn’t tell anybody. And I can’t help thinking how ironic that is because not being properly informed is his biggest complaint back at work.”

Al immediately took exception to this, insisting that he had, in fact, told Brenda the goal. The two of them began sorting through the pile of sticky notes she had received during the game, trying to find the message that he claimed would vindicate him.

Finally, Al grabbed one of the notes.

“Here it is,” he proclaimed, waving the piece of paper about.

“Could you read us what you wrote?” I asked.

“‘Collect all symbols from C, D, and E and forward them with your symbols to me.’”

“Is that a goal or a task?” Christi asked him.

Sensing his moment of vindication about to slip from his grasp, Al maintained that this note communicated the goal of the project.

Ellen disagreed. “Finding the one symbol we all had in common was the goal of the project. Having Brenda collect

all the symbols and pass them to you was a task designed to accomplish that goal. Your message told her what to do but not why she was doing it.”24

Al reluctantly conceded the point.

Inclusion—Pros and Cons

In his own defense, however, Al insisted that no one else needed to know the goal for him to complete the objective successfully; in fact, doing so would have wasted too much time. If everyone had followed the first set of instructions he sent to Brenda and passed all their symbols to him, they would have won.

This triggered a heated discussion. Other members of the team explained the confusion and inefficiencies they labored under because they had no idea why they were being asked to do what they were doing. Christi reminded him of the time lost because she tried to guess the objective, thus sending the team on a wild goose chase.

“That’s my point,” Al fired back. “With all the time we’d already wasted, it didn’t make sense to waste more giving everyone a detailed account of the whole project when all you needed to do was follow my simple instructions.”

At this point Ellen asked, “What was the goal of this game?”

“To find the common symbol,” Al replied.

“Find the common symbol. How long would it have taken to add those four words to the bottom of one of your notes to Brenda—three or four seconds?”

“Maybe, but then she had to make copies to send to everybody else.”25

“OK. Let’s say the whole process would have added thirty seconds—a minute at most. The argument that you didn’t have enough time still doesn’t hold up when you run the numbers. I think this is typical of what happens in our actual projects. We assume people know things that they don’t. Leaving them in the dark slows things down and causes mistakes; this added inefficiency causes us to run short on time, and then we blame the shortage of time for our own failure to communicate.”

“It seems that as both Al and Christi became more focused on solving the problem themselves, they stopped asking for or listening to feedback from the team,” said Brenda. “Project success requires that we maintain two-way communication at times when doing our own thing would feel much more comfortable.”

Al put his hands up in mock surrender. “OK, Brenda, you’re right; I’m wrong. You’re good; I’m bad. I’m glad we got this all cleared up.”

“Come on, Al. This isn’t about who’s right and who’s wrong,” said Brenda with a hint of exasperation. “Didn’t you hear Tom? Let’s not sit here debating whose side of the boat the leak is on. Unless we get it fixed, we’re all going down together.”

“Brenda, you’re right. That’s a fair point. I guess it just burns me that I did exactly what frustrates me most about upper management,” Al admitted. “I just assumed everybody else had the same information I did. Once I realized they didn’t, I still didn’t tell them the goal because I thought it would take too much time.”

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“I think you’ve just described a catch-22 that we fall into constantly,” said Ellen. “We just spent fifteen minutes feverishly passing notes yet were still unable to find the one symbol we all held in common. But once the game was over and we sat in a circle sharing information freely, we discovered the common symbol in a matter of seconds. If the actual work solving the puzzle took only seconds, what ate up the rest of the time?”

Everyone agreed poor communication and a failure to coordinate team effort were the obvious answers.27

“These communication breakdowns caused us to use our time and resources ineffectively,” Ellen continued. “Could poor teamwork and miscommunication also cause our complaints about inadequate time and resources for our projects? I think so.”

“I know from my own experience that working in the dark is the biggest time waster of all,” said Al. “I can’t believe that I did the very thing I most criticize others for doing.”

I reassured Al that, after running this game for over a decade, almost everyone who sits in the A chair makes exactly the same mistake and offers the same explanations. That tells me these breakdowns express something very fundamental about who we are as human beings.

Furthermore, I wanted Al to know that when communication breaks down, the team must take responsibility. One person’s failure to provide essential information often is mirrored by the failure of others to ask for it.

Why People Don’t Ask

When I questioned them as to how many had actually asked for the goal, only Christi raised her hand.

“Brenda, what kept you from asking?” I asked.

She thought for a moment. “I got so overloaded trying to respond to all the notes that I became lost in the detail and forgot.”

“Dave, how about you?”28

“I don’t know. Brenda seemed so overloaded I didn’t want to make things more difficult for her. Besides, I figured that if upper management wanted me to know something, they’d tell me.”

I have heard some version of Dave’s explanation repeated many times over the years. So many of us have learned to be either passive or reactive in the face of authority that creating a proactive, highly committed team takes some work. That work begins by noticing how and why we abdicate opportunities to contribute proactively. In an attempt to explore this idea further, I asked Dave another question.

“It must have gotten boring sitting back there without any idea what was going on. Did you ever try to perk things up by sending any funny notes?”

This question sent both he and Brenda into fits of laughter.

“Well, I was getting kind of hungry sitting back there,” he said by way of explaining the laughter, “so I sent Brenda a note asking her, ‘What’s for lunch?’”

“Did she reply?” I asked.

“That’s the funny part,” said Brenda. “I quickly dashed off a reply telling him to ‘eat his stars,’ referring to the symbols on his instruction sheet. But I was writing so fast I accidentally addressed the message to Christi instead of Dave.”

“How did that turn out?”

“I had been waiting impatiently for an answer to my second note asking about the goal of the exercise,” said Christi “When I received an answer telling me to eat my stars, I concluded that this project was far more complex than I thought.”

Christi’s deadpan delivery triggered another round of laughter, but there was a certain gallows humor to the joke. They all knew that in their current crisis a little breakdown like this could undermine a project’s success and finish them off for good. Perhaps that recognition prompted this observation from Dave.29

“I said before that I didn’t ask about the goal because I didn’t want to increase Brenda’s workload, but I’m noticing that somehow I could justify asking her, ‘What’s for lunch?’ That doesn’t add up, does it?”

“It sounds like you may also have been committed to something other than team success. Do you have any idea what that might have been?” I asked him.

“It’s a little embarrassing to admit, but I think, sometimes, I’m committed to not being blamed for failure. If I don’t know something, I can’t be held responsible. That way I can be the nice guy, the funny guy, and the helpful guy without becoming the fall guy. I never realized how high a price the whole team was paying for my desire to keep a low profile. It makes me question in what other ways I may be unintentionally sabotaging our success.”

Playing this game reveals how small, inconsequential acts that slip by unnoticed during the relentless pressures of everyday work can quickly compound into costly project breakdowns. All of these breakdowns, large or small, share a common denominator that Ellen summarized as follows.

“I see another parallel between this game and the real world,” she said. “In each story we’ve heard so far, Christi, Al, and Dave overemphasized the success of their individual tasks at the expense of the entire system. This happens in our projects all the time. Obviously, if we don’t know the goal and don’t take time to plan, these types of breakdowns are inevitable.”

“It’s just like a freeway at rush hour,” said Dave. “Metering lights slow down each driver’s ability to get on the freeway by a few minutes, but that allows the whole system to keep running more smoothly. Maybe if we did a better job identifying the bottlenecks in our projects, we could do a better job pacing the flow of work and improve our overall performance.”

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Unchecked Assumptions

“I like the freeway analogy,” said Brenda. “But it brings up another important point. For a system like that to work, everybody needs to be clear what the signals mean and what they are supposed to do in response. That wasn’t my experience in the game. For example, I never understood why you refused to tell me your symbols the first time I asked, Dave.”

Dave replied: “My instructions said, ‘You may exchange notes only with B. You will find five symbols below. You may not show them to any other person.’ I interpreted that to mean that I wasn’t supposed to tell you what I had. Then, when I saw everybody else exchanging information, I thought maybe it meant that I couldn’t draw the symbols, but I could describe them. Writing all that information out sure took a lot of extra time.”

“I just assumed that it meant I couldn’t show the instruction sheet to anyone, but it was OK to draw the symbols,” Christi added. “It’s interesting to see how different interpretations of even one simple sentence can change the outcome of the entire project. Snippets of information exchanged through e-mail can produce similar results. Those little misunderstandings can quickly escalate into finger-pointing and blame—especially when working at warp speed.”

Blame, frustration, and boredom can cause us to make further assumptions that undermine team success.

For example, in one session a person sitting in the E chair became so frustrated with the lack of information and feedback that he crumpled up his instruction sheet, threw it on the floor, stormed out of the class, and never came back. He allowed his feelings of indignation to become so overpowering that they shut down his capacity to learn something new.32

“If people experience these kinds of feelings in a fifteen-minute game, which ultimately has no real-world consequences,” I pointed out, “imagine what must be going on in the pressure cooker of a real project environment when financial success and self-esteem hang in the balance.”

Emotional static causes us to take our eye off the goal and consumes a great deal of energy. In the lean, just-in-time world of warp speed projects, this reaction is something we just can’t afford. Technical tools such as Gantt charts and project software do not address these emotional issues and aren’t able to remove these major barriers blocking project success. Project management is people management and must address this emotional component.

“In what way, if any, did emotional static or limiting assumptions alter your commitment to team success?” I asked the group.

“I got buried in detail,” said Brenda. “That caused me to start feeling stressed—very much the way I do in my real job. I began to rush and miss important details. It also caused me to focus on answering messages instead of making sense of the entire project.”

“I just got bored,” said Dave. “Without knowing what we were trying to accomplish or why, the whole exercise just seemed pointless, and I kind of dropped out. That’s why I started sending Brenda notes about getting together for lunch.”

“You’re not alone,” I assured him. “I remember one person who felt so offended that her time was being wasted that she refused to play. When asked for her symbols, she sent blank notes, and she responded to the questions about percentage complete by saying, ‘I don’t know and I don’t care!’33

“She felt very self-righteous about her behavior, insisting that it was an appropriate response to such a stupid game. I asked if she responded this way to real-world situations that she found stupid or ambiguous. She proudly proclaimed that it was—she had no intention of committing to something she didn’t care about. Since this attitude doomed her team to failure in the game, I asked her if it had similar repercussions in actual project work. She thought for a moment and then admitted that this was also probably true.

“She acknowledged that she had never looked at it from that perspective before. People who don’t care won’t commit, and that’s a problem because the key to success, in projects as in life, is making and keeping clear commitments.”

Everyone agreed that the Project Game had revealed a blind spot in their perceptions about their jobs that caused serious errors in judgment. They concluded that they needed to better understand what was causing this blind spot before they could decide what to do about it.

The Project Game revealed that project management is really people management. The implications of this were expressed in five key insights:

1. Confusion is the root cause of warp speed poisoning.
2. We can force compliance, but we can only invite commitment.
3. People who don’t care won’t commit. The key to success, in projects as in life, is making and keeping clear commitments.
4. Project success requires that we maintain two-way communication at times when doing our own thing would feel much more comfortable.
5. Overemphasis on individual tasks can bog down the entire system.34

All of these observations point to a fundamental blind spot that persistently derails projects. The four rules essential for project breakthrough lie hidden by this blind spot. Before Christi and her team could discover the four keys to project success, this obstruction had to be cleared.

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