My Dear Project Managers,
I so look forward to our correspondence. Your lovely smiling faces light up an otherwise bleak project space.
I write you today to introduce you to a new way of navigating projects. One that doesn’t follow such strict conventions. One that allows you to experience the project in a new light.
Friends, let me tell you about dérive.
Dérive is a French word meaning “drift.” It is a concept first described by Guy Debord. Guy describes it as such “a mode of experimental behavior linked to the conditions of urban society: a technique of rapid passage through varied ambiances." It is an unplanned journey through a landscape, usually urban, in which participants drop their everyday relations and "let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there"
(For a video discussing dérive in Venice, Italy, see Dami Lee’s amazing video on the aura of art and architecture. I absolutely adore her videos and cannot recommend them enough)
In its simplest explanation, a dérive is a way of wandering through a city, aimlessly without direction; without a destination in mind. The first time I visited Paris, France as an adult I was introduced to the concept. Myself, my most cherished friend, and my second cousin went on a dérive through the streets of Paris. Allowing ourselves to be pulled down narrow streets, into beautiful treelined plazas, discovering quaint shops selling all types of bread, cheeses, specialty butter, flowers, books, and anything you could possibly imagine.
We found a tiny café in Le Marais, that had gorgeous flowers that draped off the canapes covering the sunny and breezy outdoor seating area.
I remember vividly a moment when we all felt that we were walking too quickly. At the risk of sounding like a new ager, it was as if Le Marais was beckoning us to enjoy the surroundings. It was a perfect cool sunny day, there was just a whisper of wind. It was that day that I realized how much character a city could have. How the stone and plaster buildings, gently warmed by the sun, the gently swaying branches of the trees lining the city streets, the din of people talking and laughing, all of this contribute to the beauty of the world, and all it took, was getting lost.
This letter isn’t to discuss my experience in the city of lights, we are a blog about business and project management after all… and my degree is in I/O psychology, not psychogeography or situationism. No, I am here to discuss drifting through your projects.
Within the company that I now affectionately call my employ, we have very rigid projects. Everything is scheduled, everything is broken into milestones, each milestone has various performance indicators that the milestone must reach. Very rarely does anything go out late. From a purely academic perspective, it is the ideal version of a project management office.
But we hid a deep dark secret. Everyone was miserable, on a “next week, on a very special episode of PMO, Joey admits that she’s been thinking of quitting, Dawson wonders aloud how to get out a locked trunk, and Joshua pleads for the nightmare to end.” Yes, our PMO also features Jensen Ackles, mostly in the form of Supernatural memes shared on Teams.
Conventional psychology would argue that the misery was rooted in the endless promenade of successful deployments. The work had become easy, so there was no growth, and no growth lead to misery and boredom.
In a retrospective meeting on a cloudy Thursday morning, I begin to daydream. I begin to relive my dérive through the Parisian quarter. A day that I spent with two of my favorite people in the world. How the simple act of getting lost changed the way I view the world around me, and in a way that didn’t involve getting PTSD.
More importantly, our walk around Paris didn’t involve milestones, it wasn’t scheduled, we didn’t have a destination, we just had each other, and the city. We could have seen the exact same locals, had we sat down, spent a ton of time researching quaint little boutiques, and walked from location to location on a tight schedule. However, it wouldn’t have been the same.
I started to realize that our organization’s dedication to getting things out on time, meant that we weren’t allowing ourselves to see the buildings, the trees, small boutiques that gave the world character. We were focused on the schedule and the endpoint. It was there in that uncomfortably warm conference room, that I made my mind up. I wanted to take a project team on a dérive.
We had a project coming up that was a brand-new software/hardware configuration. It was going to include a lot of experimentation on the part of our team members. This was my opportunity.
A defining concept of a dérive is aimless and without direction. How do you wander aimlessly without direction when a project needs to have a goal?
Our final deliverable was the city. Our aimless path through and attempt to discover the deliverable would be our dérive.
My father likes to say that “the person who doesn’t know where they are going will usually get there in record time.” My friends, I would love to say that we were able to finish in record time, or that we didn’t have any problems along the way, but alas, that wouldn’t be the truth.
We ran into dead ends, there was frustration, there was concern that we didn’t have enough to work on, but were still expected to perform at a high level.
However, fellow PMs, the benefits that our small team enjoyed are immeasurable.
First, allowing our engineers to have a more exploratory process of discovery allowed them to have a deeper understanding of what needed to be done. In our retrospective, the head engineer mentioned that he never felt as knowledgeable about a project as he did with this one. He knew the whats, the whys, and the whos, where before he just knew his bit.
Just like it’s easy to miss the aesthetic of the modern main street USA, consisting of an ultrawide street, gas stations, and large chain fast food chains, it is easy to miss the things that are characterizing the work of the project. His description of the amazing Hitchcockian fridge logic moment was so powerfully reminiscent of the same moment I had sitting in a delightful café, in the heart of the trendy Parisian quarter. It was something he couldn’t capture on film, he couldn’t take a souvenir home with him, it was just something that he had memories of, like the warmth of the sun and the kiss of wind on that beautiful spring afternoon.
The second thing that came from our experiment was a change in perspective. No longer were our engineers building something, they were solving problems. They were allowed to be creative, think beyond their typical processes, and collaborate in a way that the team had never had the pleasure of experiencing in their professional career. The lack of clear direction allowed the team to have a common goal.
My PM mentor and personal hero argues that project teams already have an inbuilt common goal, to get their project out on time. In my experience, however, work tends to become artificially siloed, especially when it comes to software engineering. What our dérive uncovered was that our engineers actually need that common goal, and it’s something that can get lost as work is progressing.
Most importantly, the engineers all felt that they had a renewed interest in the little things. Changing from a milestone-driven project to our dérive methodology (patent pending) allowed us to really focus on things like quality, scalability, functionality, the customer experience, the unknowns, the long-term, the implementation, and the necessary training. The discussions we were able to have on a regular basis gave everyone an opportunity to provide insight. Team members that were frequently silent in meetings suddenly found a voice and provided such an amazing depth of understanding of what we were doing. This knowledge and insight had been hidden from us the entire time.
Much like discovering the little pâtisserie with the amazing croquettes and praline Paris-Brest, we were delighted to learn that the quiet engineer was incredibly knowledgeable, but lacked self-confidence.
Please don’t mistake me here, friends. I am not advocating that you throw out all processes, improvise your way through like Wendy Allen did in our 6th-grade production of Peter Pan (just because you share a name with the Lead character does not mean that you deserve to be the lead!); what I am encouraging you all to try out is allowing your team members to “drift.”
The term that is used to describe this is typically called “job crafting.” However, in recent years many managers have taken it to mean that workers should work beyond their roles and responsibilities. With recent pop-terms such as “quiet quitting,” meaning that employees are only doing their expected work, and nothing more, this has come under fire. What many managers are failing to understand is that the expectation that employees will take on extra work isn’t job crafting, it’s just expecting the employee to do more.
What job crafting is focused on is allowing the employee to grow by allowing them to freely take on work that interests them. Our little team had always focused on milestones. When we practiced our dérive, it allowed the team members to gain insight into things that were happening behind the scenes aspect of running a project. It allowed them to have further knowledge of processes that interested them. It allowed them to go into their new project with an active interest in taking on part of these other jobs, to be involved. I, for one, encourage it.
What we learned was that allowing our team to craft their own roles allowed them to be more engaged with the projects. It’s something that has spilled over into other projects that they’ve worked on. It further allowed us to tap into the tacit knowledge that was hidden in those who otherwise would remain quiet.
We’ve since gone back to our typical milestone-driven methodologies. We still are able to release on time and on budget with relentless efficiency, but everyone is much more engaged.
No, it is potentially wasteful to run through a project completely aimlessly. What we can do, however, is learn from our experiment. There is so much potential hidden within the team, that might miss out on if you don’t allow yourself to stray from the rigid structure of whatever methodology you currently use.
As PMs, you should be empowered to use whatever strategy you can in order to tap into this potential. Take a moment to bring people into meetings that wouldn’t normally be there. Reach out to the quiet kid and see what they have to say. Encourage everyone to grow in ways that they are most comfortable with. Not everyone is going to want to take on additional work, regardless of how much it interests them, but they might want to provide guidance or input in meetings, or planning discussions. They might feel comfortable writing up feedback or sending messages regarding thoughts or concerns they might have. Encourage that!
Above all, understand this, sometimes, even in projects, it can be beneficial to get a little lost; you just have to look around at the things hidden in the city streets, and let your intuition, and the city, pull your way down alleyways.
Je vous souhaite la santé, le bonheur, et la prospérité,
Christina
Author’s PS: Several of you have asked if I have a problem with swearing. I don’t. When I was a young girl, my grandmother heard me use a very mild bad word, and she told me that I shouldn’t freely swear. Instead, only use it when you have to, that way people know when you mean f***ing business.
When I was asked to join the Astutely Obtuse team, I was so incredibly honored. The three of us shared a common vision for a better way of doing things. One that takes into consideration that everyone on the project team are people with families, hobbies, friends, a life outside of work, etc. We knew that our snarky approach to poking at the existing worldview of those in business would meet some pushback. We were not expecting to have people say, “go kill yourself.”
I grew up in a family where everyone was involved in business. I knew how heartless business leaders could be. What I didn’t know was even daring to suggest that managers take into consideration the mental health of their employees, that managers should be stewards to the growth of their employees, or that some organizations have very bad habits that are creating problems among the team members would be met with such vitriol, such hatred, an anger that is entirely misplaced.
Knowing that we are moving forward, writing articles that will be criticizing Agile methodologies by suggesting that there is potentially a better way of doing things, and knowing that supporters of Agile can be hyper-aggressive towards anyone who dares to question its effectiveness, I’ve decided to end my time as a contributor to Astutely Obtuse.
For those of you who subscribed and those of you who messaged us with an outpouring of love, I say thank you. It is heartwarming to know that there are managers out there that see the benefits of someone covering the things that we have in our few short months. For those of you who got so upset over what we wrote; so much so that you decided to take the time to comment hateful things, to send us hateful emails, calling for us to kill ourselves I say: get fucked.
Editor's Note: HOLY SHIT WE DID IT!
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