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4
The Rules of Warp Speed

Given the pattern of breakdowns you’ve observed playing this game, can you identify any rules that will enable you to run your projects more effectively?” I asked the team.

“Always communicate the goal to the entire project team,” Al offered.

“That’s good, but I’m not sure it goes deep enough.” Brenda added. “One of the things this exercise underscored for me is the huge gap between what we know and what we actually do. Always communicating the goal is the perfect example. As you pointed out earlier, Al, that’s one of your biggest frustrations back on the job, and I think you see me as the main source of that problem. But the minute you sat in the A chair you failed to act on what you already knew.”

“I think you’re onto something,” said Christi. “We all fell into the trap of knowing one thing but doing something far less effective under pressure. I think we’re missing something in ourselves that stands between the knowing and the doing.”

“You mean a blind spot,” said Al.

“Well, we’ve sure caused more than our share of collisions,” she replied.44

Upon closer examination, failure to communicate the project goal seemed to be a single component of a much broader communication breakdown. They decided to list the other instances of miscommunication and see if they could find a fundamental misstep that tied them all together. The list included Christi’s sending the team on a wild goose chase with a false goal, Al’s confusion of task and goal, and Dave’s counterproductive participation choices.

Ellen pointed out that, in each case, people had acted on unchecked assumptions. For example, while Christi assumed that no one knew the goal and therefore she needed to invent one, Al assumed that everyone knew the goal or didn’t need to know. Dave cut himself out of the loop by assuming that if he were supposed to know something somebody would tell him.

“I think what we’re saying is, Don’t make assumptions,” said Al.

“In a warp speed world, assumptions are inevitable,” said Dave. “I think it was our failure to check those assumptions that created the unnecessary confusion and wasted so much time. If we had done a better job of including each other, we could have eliminated that lack of clarity. That’s exactly what happened when we all sat in a circle.”

“How about ‘Avoid confusion through inclusion’?” Al suggested.

“Inclusion reminds us to keep communication flowing between layers,” said Ellen, “and I think the rhyme is cute.”

“Let’s write it down,” said Brenda.

So Ellen wrote down on the whiteboard:

THE RULES OF WARP SPEED

• AVOID CONFUSION THROUGH INCLUSION.

“That’s a good starting point,” said Christi, “but it raises another concern. Al, you and I have had a number of conversations about senior management not keeping you better informed. It seems to me that ‘Avoid confusion through inclusion’ is a principle that you’ve championed strongly long before this class.”45

“That’s right,” he said, as if someone had just challenged him to step outside.

“Don’t get me wrong,” said Christi, picking up on the edge in his voice, “I agree with you. I’m just noticing how easy it is to believe one thing and to do something quite different under pressure. After all, when you sat in the A chair you fell into the same trap I do. I think we need to ask ourselves why this somewhat obvious rule is so easily and consistently violated.”

Again, reviewing their experience in the Project Game, everyone agreed they felt rushed. By acting too quickly some people were left out, mistakes were made, and key pieces of information were overlooked that caused everything to take more time.

“How about ‘Go slow to go fast’?” said Brenda.

“That’s part of the answer,” Christi agreed, “but we don’t want to always go slow. Sometimes we need to go fast to go fast. I think what we may be noticing is that we need to pace ourselves. Taking more time in the beginning stages may enable us to spend a lot less time overall.”

“I’ve got it!” said Al. “‘Shift from racing to pacing.’”

“I like that,” said Ellen, “and I think it further explains why overemphasis on individual tasks can produce a net loss for the entire system.”

“Help us make that connection,” I asked her.

“If any one layer of the project system moves so quickly that a dependent layer can’t keep up, communication between them will break down. That could ripple through the entire system. For example, when Brenda rushed to clear her growing pile of messages, she accidentally sent Christi the note that said ‘Eat your stars.’ From Brenda’s perspective the quicker she wrote, the more messages she cleared off her desk. She didn’t know, until after the game, that her increased productivity came at the expense of the entire team.”46

“Now I feel guilty,” said Brenda.

“Wasn’t it you who said, ‘It doesn’t matter whose side of the boat the leak is on’?” said Al.

“Thanks for the reminder,” said Brenda. “If we could all just remember to do what we already know, we could probably improve our performance 100 percent.”

“That’s what these basic rules are intended to do,” I told her. “They create a simple, easily remembered shorthand that keeps us focused on core success factors. That’s why I like Al’s rhyming scheme. It’s easy to remember.”

While we were talking, Ellen had added Al’s second contribution to the list as follows:

THE RULES OF WARP SPEED

• AVOID CONFUSION THROUGH INCLUSION.
• SHIFT FROM RACING TO PACING.

Continuing this line of inquiry, the obvious follow-up question was “What’s causing us to rush?”

“The pace of technological change,” said Christi.

“Constantly shifting priorities,” said Brenda.

“A bunch of clueless marketers that promise customers the moon without ever checking with us to find out what’s really possible,” said Al.

“Let me break in for just a moment,” I requested. “I understand that these are all legitimate frustrations that you deal with constantly. But notice that these explanations all blame the ‘idiots out there,’ which leaves you with very little power to change things. Keep in mind that rushing caused the same kind of breakdowns in the Project Game that you describe frustrating you in the warp speed world. However, in the Project Game, none of these external factors were present. Strip away technological change, shifting priorities, and clueless marketers, and something else still pushed you into overdrive. What was it?”47

At first this question generated a vast and prolonged silence. Getting past conventional wisdom takes patience. We waited.

“I grew impatient,” said Christi.

“Overload makes me a little frantic,” Brenda admitted.

“When I get frustrated, I sometimes make snap decisions,” said Al. “I try to take shortcuts that can lead to dead ends. The backtracking wastes more time, increases my frustration, and causes me to rush even more.”

“For me, it begins with an uncomfortable feeling in the pit of my stomach,” said Dave. “I guess it’s fear or anxiety. Whatever, I just want it to go away and I rush to get it over with. I guess sometimes what I call rushing is actually seeing a problem and then running for safety.”

“I think I do something similar, only the trigger for me is boredom,” said Ellen.

“There’s a guy by the name of Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi….”

“Could you spell that?” asked Al.

“Yes, just not correctly,” I said, trying to meet fire with fire. “But it’s pronounced ‘chick-sent-me-high’ in case you ever want to repeat what I’m about to tell you. Anyway, he’s a psychologist at the University of Chicago who has studied peak performers in business, the arts, and athletics for over twenty years. He has identified a state of effortless excellence that he has called a ‘flow’ state and that many athletes describe as ‘the zone.’

“When we experience a task as too easy, we feel bored; too difficult and we feel anxious and overwhelmed. In between boredom and anxiety we have access to this zone of effortless excellence—an integrated state of unlimited possibility.”48

A light seemed to be going on for Christi. “So, from this perspective, we want to push ourselves and each other to the point that we feel excited by the challenge but not so far that we throw up our hands in defeat.”

“Exactly. It’s that excitement that generates caring and commitment, and it’s the frustration and overwhelm that shuts it down.”

“Then it would seem that the third law would be something like ‘Work from the zone,’” said Dave. “Earlier we said ‘People who don’t care won’t commit.’ Working from the zone seems like a prerequisite to commitment.”

The team liked Dave’s suggestion, and Ellen rearranged the bullets on the whiteboard accordingly. When she was done it looked like this:

THE RULES OF WARP SPEED

• WORK FROM THE ZONE.
• SHIFT FROM RACING TO PACING.
• AVOID CONFUSION THROUGH INCLUSION.

Just to make sure that everyone was on the same page with this rapidly developing logic train, I asked Ellen to clarify why she had rearranged the order of the statements.

“Well, we noticed that most of our mistakes seemed to stem from a lack of inclusion. In asking why we left people out of the loop, we decided that we were moving too quickly and needed to pace ourselves. Finally, when we considered what was pushing us into overdrive, you pointed out that feelings of anxiety, fear, or boredom could push people out of the zone—causing them to use both their own and other people’s energy inefficiently. Since urgency leads to rushing, the sequence seemed to be zone, pacing, inclusion.”

“Great, I got it. Do those three cover all the bases?”49

“I think we need to say something about our definition of success. So far, we’ve described what makes for a successful journey, but we still haven’t identified our destination,” said Christi.

“I think that’s pretty self-evident,” said Al. “Our goal is to deliver a product that meets specification, time, and budget requirements.”

“Suppose, after achieving that goal, you send a note to all the team members congratulating them on a job well done and nobody knows what to feel good about because they were never told the goal?” Dave countered.

“Granted that’s a mistake, but our goal is satisfying the customer, not each other.”

“Satisfying the customer is an essential measure, but not the only one,” Ellen added. “We could satisfy customers by selling product at or below cost, but that would soon put us out of business. Continually frustrating our key employees could produce much the same result.”

“Or burning them out!” Brenda added. “Running on reserve is an emergency procedure, not a way of life. At least not the way I want to live my life. The way I’ve been living lately is insane. I shouldn’t even say ‘living’—all I do is work. I know one thing: that’s got to change—and fast!”

“I agree,” said Christi. “Both the project and the people must be fulfilled.”

“That sounds like the fourth rule to me,” said Ellen, and since no one objected, she added it to the list.

Translating the final list onto a finished overhead produced a chart that looked like the one:

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These rules seem pretty obvious once people have played the Project Game and begin to notice how they have limited their own success. But are these the things most people think of when they first hear the words project management? Not likely. When asked about their own associations during our interviews, Christi’s team said things like “unrealistic schedules,” “too many meetings,” “MS Project,” “Gantt charts,” “work breakdown structure,” and “critical path.” In other words, their thinking focused on problems and technical tools. By formulating these new rules, they had signaled a radical shift in their perspective, and I wanted to make sure that they were aware of that.51

When I say that project management is really about people management, people smile and nod their heads in agreement. Who wouldn’t? It’s kind of like saying you’re for Mom and apple pie. But when we look at what people actually do—in real projects and in the Project Game—a very different set of values emerge.

When people push themselves and others harder than they want to be pushed to get things done faster, schedules become techniques for applying pressure. Coworkers become a means to an end; once we have what we need from them we can move on. In this context, people management means control, and control is all about power. The chronic frustrations outlined in the Warp Speed Barrier Checklist are the inevitable outcome. I summarized our discussion about project relationships as follows.

“The new rules you have proposed define a different reality—a reality based on reciprocal rather than power relationships. The advantage of reciprocal relationships became obvious the minute you pulled your chairs into a circle and noticed that you worked much more quickly and efficiently.

“These four rules give you a simple way to test whether you’re playing the reciprocal game or the power game. If you find that you’ve slipped back into the familiar power game, they show you how to shift gears into reciprocal relationship. That shift will begin to resolve every issue on the Warp Speed Barrier Checklist.”

“That’s quite a sweeping statement,” said Al.

“You don’t have to take my word for it,” I told him. “Go out there, apply the rules, and see for yourself.” 52

“I’m willing to do that,” said Brenda. “But how do we overcome the resistance from people who haven’t been through this class?”

“What kind of resistance are you imagining?” I asked her.

“Boy, you name it. People who feel like sitting in a circle communicating is a waste of time. People upstream who don’t think it’s important for us to know the goal or assume we already know it.”

“Or how about people like the woman you described who refused to play the game because she thought it was stupid?” asked Ellen. “How do you motivate people to play by a new set of rules when they think the game itself is stupid?”

“It sounds like we’re ready to take a look at how to implement these new rules. Let’s start right here, right now. Notice how you feel when you think about all the resistance that you’re going to meet. Are you in or out of the zone? We don’t need other people to knock us out of the zone. Our own fear takes care of that quite nicely. With only six months left to live, we don’t have time for that. We’ve got to find out what turns you and your team on immediately and start working from there. That’s what it means to work from the zone.”

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