randori mind, control the chaos

How often has a co-worker enthusiastically described their elegant solution to a problem that you considered and their enthusiasm was contagious, swaying your opinion and judgment to accept their proposition? You endorsed it and aligned resources and project plans around the single concept, then defined metrics and details to track the progress. Three weeks later, the same person stands in front of you, casting sideways glances and blushing, as they describe how, after initial trials, the solution requires the mental skills of the entire MIT graduating class.

This situation often arises. The solution developer creates a personal attachment and subsequent justification with their effort, however the acceptance is more often based upon emotional rather than logical analysis. We often believe information under these conditions because a messenger of elegance is intelligent. We then extend this supposition, believing that intelligence alone provides them with the innate ability to be unaffected by emotional entanglement or misguided attribution of salvation to a concept or in this case solution. This is often proven when you hear, “He’s a smart guy, he knows what he’s doing.” In fact, we all remain human, irrespective of intelligence, education or experience. An excellent example of this is seen in testimony given by Vannevar Bush.

Dr. Bush was the man who ran the Government side of the Manhattan Project for three years, and was the first presidential science adviser. He was intimately involved in nuclear development and the direction it was taking. During his testimony to the Senate Arms Committee in 1954, he stated that nobody should be concerned with nuclear weapons being deployed as missile warheads, citing that the size and weight of a such weapons precluded their being deployed in this manner.  He supported his testimony by citing facts, knowledge and his experience. The result was that the USA shifted its fiscal allocations for military R&D. We know that this opinion was historically inaccurate.

What Dr. Bush and many others, both before and after him, failed to account for was how their opinions precluded their considering concepts that differed from their accepted theories. Psychologists identify this as shielded behavior, which leads to an inflexible or non-adaptive behavior, thinking that the future can only arrive in a single form. When anybody assembles an opinion and vocalizes it you should consider their basis; the ‘why’ behind the ‘what’.

How does this apply to professional life? Business rectifies problems through a series of decisions that are made subsequent to the ‘Start the project’ decision. Each of these individual decisions needs to balance and accumulate with others to arrive at the planned end-point of any project. Each decision, while having its foundation in emotion, is always supported with logic. The more valid sounding the logic the more it is perceived to accomplish the task. Schools and technical training aim to have managers define risk and put systems in place to mitigate the risk of any decision. Yet, when presented with The Elegant Plan that makes such logical sense, is easily understood, and makes the listener feel success is around the corner, managers will pursue it. Why? Because the managers all desire to accomplish their goals that will provide varying degrees of personal advancement. Elegance adds notice and status to the goal attainment, so it is grasped and pursued. Pursuing failed elegance costs time, money and most importantly professional credibility. The critical loss is failure to learn from our prior behavior.

Projects start daily, managed by professionals who have experience and seek personal and professional success. These same managers will listen to and apply that elegant or previously successful method to the new project, expecting results equal to their prior efforts. Some will discover that it works, and feel the sense of accomplishment while listening to the accolades of their superiors. Others will discover the cinder block and have the scramble to recover and return to the schedule. Industry data suggests that 60% of managers discover the cinder block and have project failure.  Reviewing the post-completion metrics of any project allow the cause to be localized to a small series of incidents combining to stall or derail the project. Few of these analyses discover that the tipping points were but a few individual decisions all resting on the lack of situational assessment, a lack caused by not identifying the exclusionary, shielded behavior of those who brought the elegant solution wrapped around a cinder block.

Scope creep is when your project team takes the stated requirements, begins developing a new candy bar, and within a year the project scope has become the eradication of world hunger.

Scope creep occurs in every industry and development system. The development methodology is irrelevant, it occurs in JAD, Agile, Spiral and every other methodology. Although projects are monitored and managed with a series of metrics tailored for the specific industry or business these serve to identify the results of creep and not a means to mitigate the cause, which is controllable.

The research for this paper was done by interviewing project managers, engineers and developers. They often identified failed projects by citing specific missed metrics, which was expected since that is the common identified gauge of progress and success. With probing, in the form of open-ended questions, the interviewees then began describing their experience with scope creep. It was at this time that they changed from stating values and numbers and presented emotional connection with the project difficulties.

All of the interviewees identified scope creep was the universal source of schedule and cost disruption. Everyone recounted multiple experiences in their careers where it made successful project completion difficult to impossible. While it is so common, it is also consistently misidentified as a cause of project disruption, when it is really a demonstrable result.

Any failed project analyzed on an abstracted or high level and starts identically to successful ones. Requirements are collected from customers, and costs, time and manpower are then defined within the project plan and schedule. The project is started with the customer and supplier aligned to achieve a specific technical target. As time elapses there are subtle changes to the schedule or requirements based upon new information or needs provided by the customer. These changes amplify, gaining importance and shifting requirements, affecting the development effort or sequence. When enough changes accumulate, the impact necessitates re-scoping the project to adjust the level of effort or time to accommodate all of the changes. This cycle of modified information or reprioritizating continues until the project is either delivered in some form modified from the original or canceled. Upon its conclusion a final analysis is performed on the project.

The analysis is performed with information derived from the records and tracking metrics. The sources of creep are identified in the metrics, but the cause for the additional requirements is beyond that scope. By constraining the observations and analysis to the management metrics the true causality of creep is masked. The answer to the why the creep occurred is often, “The customer and managers didn’t understand the repercussions of their activities,” or “After the customer reviewed the process they discovered critical gaps that needed to be addressed.” This indicates the presence of focalism and the situational biases on the part of the customer.  The focalism causes each situation, and the result identified as Scope Creep. Knowing this information is the first step, the solution then is to identify and correct the focalism to avoid expanding the development effort or cycle.

Developing initial project requirements is a straightforward and well documented activity in business. It is the subsequent discovery of derivative requirements, caused by developing biases on the part of customers, that impacts generates the creep. At the outset of requirements development, the customer’s project manager is involved. This person is often not a frequent hands-on user of the application but is more a technical user who adds anecdotal end-user information to the requirements definition. The manager, during the scope definition stage, initially has a professional detachment in the project. He becomes vested in the process, professionally and emotionally attached, only after the project has started. As the project evolves the customer’s project manager’s emotional attachment to the success of the project increases. The project shifts from an abstract technical activity to the source of raises, promotions and personal recognition. This behavior leads to a series of biases, leading to focalism and causes the individuals to strive for increased acceptance which translates to enhanced performance from the application. Bigger, better (more functionality) and faster are the general attributes they look to achieve. These new attributes are refined and then rolled into additional requirements. This iterative addition can be managed and in many cases minimized by effectively addressing the source.

The methods to accomplish this reduction in focalism, and thereby scope creep, are done with a brief series of additions at different stages of the project cycle. Both the initial and subsequent requirements collection stages can be modified to become effective to meet project requirements. Mitigating customer focalism is most effective through the continuous redirection of non-technical, intangible deliverables to the customer’s project management through the project life cycle.

The scope creep as a cause for deliverable slippage in a project development is a gross misidentification of causality. The metrics seldom identify or track the intangible components of a project or customer/supplier interactions. The real cause is not the technical aspect of a project, requirements definition, data accuracy and planning, but the human aspect of every project that is improperly managed and results in creep. When development managers begin uncovering and mediating the causes of customer focalism the results will be diminished scope creep. Consider that even a 10-15% creep reduction can make the difference between a successful or failed project. What then is the value to your firm for this readily learned project management skill?

Placing the best, most affordable and hopefully most desired product on the market is every businessman’s goal. Sometimes we prevent ourselves from reaching the optimal levels of product development because we take the product and process far too seriously.   The route to this end may be something other than what is taught in MBA classes.

The optimal development outcome is to deliver a product under budget, over functional and ahead of schedule. Is this really enough? What about quality standards? Achieving those Six Sigma performance levels, reaching the statistically minimum accepted level of defectives should bolster product acceptance. Yet, even with this level of quality there needs to be more. There are the marketing efforts to convince people that their lives are better, more fulfilling and less stressful when they use this new product. Companies employ legions to generate market buzz and customer testimonials. There are far easier methods to make your products the most sought after on the planet. After all, what is high quality and how is it really valued by consumers.

Kopi Luwak is the most expensive coffee in the world, selling for between $120 and $600 per pound in United States. The coffee is grown in Indonesian and produced in a singularly unique manner. Civets, native cats, are fed raw coffee berries, which are digested except for the coffee bean. The bean passes through the digestive system and is defecated by the animal. We are told that the beans are then collected, washed, and given only a light roast so as to not destroy the complex flavors that develop through the process, and offered for sale. These are the facts known to every civet coffee consumer.

What is the connection to American product development processes? Despite the combined efforts of major US corporations, a few marketing geniuses from Indonesia have shown the simple way to success. The United States spends more than $320 billion annually on R&D, to remain at the leading edge of technology and maintain market share. The Indonesian coffee growers simply catch a few more civets and feed them coffee berries. The United States spends billions more on developing distribution channels for our product supply chains. The civet coffee growers, they use small one pound cans costing less than a dime apiece and have buyers beating a path to their door. Finally we spend additional billions on advertising and marketing, trumpeting the new and improved products. The civet coffee growers simply describe how their product is organically processed. Consumers buy every gram of civet coffee that is produced annually, while in the US, there are continuous streams of overstocks and failed products.

Let’s add an additional aspect to this analysis, honesty. By law American products need to be thoroughly tested, extensive records maintained for three to seven years, and insurance bought to cover liability. The directors and executives of companies are held accountable for the accuracy and details of their product development and QA records. Yet, for all of the experience, professional education, money and effort American corporations cannot exceed the results of a few simple coffee growers. Let me describe the irony in a civil manner.

 I will use the first person for illustrative purposes. Fact: I am coffee drinker, and for personal consumer satisfaction, I am willing to pay up to $600 for a pound of coffee that was extracted from the feces of a cat. OK, so the growers claim it is washed, but what is the cleanliness standard of a person who crumples dry cat droppings for a living? If I buy it ground, how am I to know how well it was washed? Could there be a case for labeling the product as completely organic? Then, the growers claim it is delicately roasted so as to not disturb the delicate flavors. Again, the root question, why do I believe somebody who grabs beans from a litter box and claims they’re tasty? For all that I the consumer know, that roasting could simply be to eliminate surface moisture. The addition of preserving that delicate bouquet could easily be nothing more than a tag line.  It certainly beats, “We give it a few minutes in a clothes dryer with some wood shavings so our packers don’t complain about the litter box smell.” And yet with the facts clearly and audaciously stated, year in and year out, the entire crop is sold with production restricted only by the appetite of the native civet.

So, when you’re working eighteen hours a day, struggling to deliver that critical, next generation product, ask one question. Is it the need for perfection that drives product acceptance or is it something else? Processing and selling litter box clumps for $600 per pound seems to indicate that success is possible outside the perceptual box of perfection.  Sometimes the ‘best’ is not what you think it is, and sometimes it certainly doesn’t sound perfect, but that is to your ears and way of thinking. In the end, the best of anything is what others believe. It is through their perception and needs that a product is accepted as superior and even coveted. Sometimes it is just to show that they are capable of drinking anything.

Greg Chenevert

It’s normal to pursue goals, to develop a better life and strive for success. A common problem is that we believe that possessing a single additional skill, technique or method will allow us to achieve our success. This is why you often hear such phrases as, “If I had only done…” or “If I had only said…” Following this belief you will discover stress and frustration because you are not missing a single element, you are fighting against natural laws.
Quantum mechanics, initially quantified by Werner Heisenberg, examines how our reality operates. From his work, one principle arose that equally applies to both quantum physics and daily life, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. The short version of the Uncertainty Principle is that the more you focus on a single point solution within a dynamic environment the more unlikely your goal will be achieved.
Life is a series of dynamic, flowing events, combining personal change, learning and experience. Your life is further randomized when the actions of others impact your options and choices. Uncertainty is everywhere, you never know when you will need to engage a skill, or resolve a problem. You don’t know the future, but by now you have experienced the results of random events, they’re called accidents.
So, why do we always look for the magic solution, that one “Aha!” moment? Perhaps it’s hope overwhelming logic, possibly it is emotion working in conjunction ego, maybe we’ll never really know. It doesn’t matter. What does matter is having the solution to overcome uncertainty and achieve your goals. Your solution is to not fight against the Uncertainty Principle but to embrace it. Some groups and individuals have done so for centuries, well before the Uncertainty Principle was quantified, they knew how to achieve success. These were the old school martial artists, whether Japanese, Chinese and others, use identical fundamentals that consistently provide success.

Your first step to success is to stop wasting time looking for the magic bullet. Remember, the more you convince yourself that the magic bullet is your salvation, the less likely that you will achieve your goal. Specific techniques, methods work only when perfectly matched with very specific circumstances and only during a miniscule window of opportunity. You waste precious time focusing on techniques, learn only the basics so that you can identify them when others attempt to use them. You know that you cannot predict which technique will be immediately available for every randomly occurring situation. Instead, bear one fact in mind, there is at least one solution to everything that you encounter.
Solutions for every problem or the directions to any goal are defined by principles. For example, learning the principles of dealing with people enables you to interact with others and achieve results in any circumstance. Learning the principles of conflict resolution allows you to direct the outcome of any situation regardless of inception, people involved or the time that has passed since it started. Your knowledge of operating principles prevents you from attempting to force fit a technique to a situation. Focusing your efforts to apply a singular technique to a problem increases the probability that there is no match, and in all likelihood makes the solution unusable. The alternative is to draw upon your adaptive knowledge and skills and apply them in conjunction with the events of the situation. This is the Heisenberg Solution, which is employing principles to increase your probability to solve a problem, any problem, and achieve success.

You will more readily achieve your goals when you overlay principles of action and response to generate two results. You will to trump the Uncertainty Principle through a flexible, balanced strategy, and you will direct outcomes to benefit your future. Through continued practice you will eventually discover that when random events occur, your manner and outlook will negate their effects. The ability to apply principles instead of techniques will set you above the problems of daily life and will provide for your continuously improving success.

Greg Chenevert

The basis for this blog, and for that matter everything that I write, is that you know inside, in your most private of moments what is best for you and what you really want. My goal is to make you think and to provide you with the tools that you need. It is your life and therefore your choice as to which tools you want to use, and when you want to use them. With that in mind, consider the following information.

A hamster racing in its exercise wheel, running as fast as possible and yet it remains living in a cage. I wonder if the people who feel that their lives are stalled sense a connection with its plight. Nobody wants to feel like that hamster, caged and helpless. You want success, now and in the future, yet, too often there seems to be an obstacle between where you are and where you want to be, an obstacle that seems to cage in your efforts. Success starts once you set your direction through your obstacle. This effort is very personal and requires that you only answer two questions. That’s all that is required to move forward. But, why take my opinion when you can prove it to yourself.

Try this small experiment; ask a dozen people what success means, you will receive a dozen different answers. After they reply, “Winning the lottery,” and once the awkward expression or possibly a nervous giggle subsides it will be replaced by thoughtful consideration. At this point they will each provide you with their personal concepts. Most often their answers will revolve around health, love and family, and possibly financial stability; excessive amounts of money are seldom mentioned. Now ask a second question, “Why is it that the concept of success is diverse and so elusive?” This will lead to a conversation about life and achieving what each person wishes their life to become. After doing this experiment a few times you’ll get the idea that success is a feeling of accomplishing certain goals, some of intrinsic value and others of a more material value. Here is where the subject of success returns to you. The fact is that answering these two questions honestly will provide twenty five percent of your journey to living a successful life. The reason for this leap forward towards your goals is because with only two questions you have identified the gap between what is and what you want to be.

In business development answering these questions is part of the concept of gap analysis. The procedure is done to discover where the shortcomings of a plan reside. Once the deficiencies are known it becomes far easier to define what needs to be done to fill the gap for present and future operations. This is the process that has worked to improve business operations for decades. It is also the procedure that has been used in martial arts training for centuries. It has proven to develop some of the best individuals in the arts for generations and can supply you with similar results in your life.

Let’s return to our running hamster for a moment, lots of activity and no change. Your life can be this way when you expend hours of effort reviewing what is wrong with life, why you haven’t gotten ahead and yet repeating the same behavior that you have used in the past. When you develop or explain away your lack of success with excuses you are adding bars to your mental cage. Excuses bound your thinking, narrow your observation and limit your sense of opportunity.

One common excuse: I don’t have enough education to succeed where I want.

Reality: A friend of mine has not graduated from college; he is now in his mid-forties and never considered this excuse. He works from his home, travels about three weeks a year and earns over a quarter million dollars a year. He spends time with his family, makes every school event for his children, every sports game and special event. He takes his family on vacation for a month each year and does nothing but enjoy his time with them. He is successful, not because he makes the salary he does, but in his words, “I’m successful because I get to be a father, husband and son to my family”. How does he do this? Well, he learned how through time and effort and without artificially blinding himself with excuses or limitations.

If you want more details than this, write to me and I’ll tell you, or read more of my blogs and learn how to succeed in your life as he has in his.

Greg Chenevert

During a recent sales workshop I focused on eliminating an underlying concept that often sabotages sales efforts. This concept is one where the seller follows an incremental approach, feeling out the prospective buyer for their sentiment or position on a product or service. This wastes valuable time and often causes the prospective buyer to question the knowledge or credibility of the seller.

In martial arts training we learn one critical skill, you do one action to achieve one result, anything less and you’re either hit or picking yourself up from the mat. This same budo mind-set is very applicable in your business or professional life. The ‘secret’ to this ability is your commitment. When you are committed to accomplishing something you consciously identify the desired result. Your commitment then moves you to minimize your actions and focus solely on those that will achieve the desired result. With practice you will be able to make the shift from taking multiple steps to the result to making a single step to the result. During the seminar, one person asked, “So this means that with a single statement you can get a sale?” The answer is, “No, you get a result. The sale is a derivative of achieving the result. It isn’t the goal; it is your reward for achieving the goal.”
This sounds kind of Zen like, but consider what you really need to do when you either sell a product, service or yourself during a job interview.

Your goals for sales should be: 

Gain acceptance as a professional and equal
Have the other person listen to you and accept your concepts
Attain mutual understanding
Develop a method to fulfill mutual needs

When you sequentially achieve these four results, your reward is a sale, or if you are a job seeker, who in that circumstance you are selling yourself, you receive a job offer.  The sales process is then broken into four actions to achieve four corresponding results. When you master these and achieve them you get the reward. For those who attended the seminar, well, they couldn’t wait to get out the next day and try what they learned. The feedback since then has been one of incredulity at how simple, yet enormously effective, their training was.

We are wonderfully individual in so many ways, and yet so remarkably identical in others. One example of our identical behavior is when we review past efforts in order to discover why we failed to achieve a particular goal. Far too often, we decide that our methods and knowledge were up to the task, and with this interim conclusion then deduce that the failure probably happened because of an unknown variable. This should fire off those Flashing Red Lights in our minds, because the next conclusion invariably is, “I didn’t try hard enough.” With this set in our minds we then repeat our efforts with more energy only to generate the identical results. The second failure elevates our frustration and stress, and then plops us onto the mental hamster wheel of circular analysis that leads nowhere.

Let’s start over. When you discover that you come up short on a goal, accept the fact that you can direct outcomes, yet didn’t that time: as Shakespeare wrote, “The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in the stars, but in ourselves.” Outcomes occur, not by mysterious, unknown variables, but simply by your not reading and directing the situation efficiently. And yet, you do have the ability to direct any situation when you engage the most important skill that you possess, your ability to learn. It only takes two steps to traverse from almost accomplished to successfully accomplished.
The first step is simple. All that you need to do is acknowledge that while you have been educated, and know enough to earn a living that you can always learn more so as to do more with your life. Learning is the process of discovering unused methods to make your life better, period. The second step is adopting new skills to accomplish your goals with less effort, or achieve more with the same degree of effort.
 
So, the next time that your inner voice begins the common circular analysis of failure, close your eyes to see the Flashing Red Lights, and pause. Then analyze what you need to add to your skills to get what you want, get the knowledge and apply it. The results will be short term achievement, a sense of control and you will be developing the pattern for long term success.