Somewhere Near Wilmington People Moved to the Center

Riding the Acela Express from Boston to Washington DC this morning I wondered if I could explain my thoughts on the work of projects. (While the train is supposed to travel at 150 MPH, the tracks were under construction throughout much of Conn. The scenery was nice!) Yesterday I mentioned there are two kinds of action on projects. I've tried to simplify those actions to one word or concept for each. For the first I tried making or doing or manipulating, but none are general enough. So moving on I see the second type of action as conversation for coordinating action. But that isn't inclusive enough. The linguistic action of projects includes the assessments we make — evaluating how well we are doing; it includes the speculating and planning we do; it includes setting goals, assigning roles, establishing rules, and setting standards; it also includes the negotiating, approving, deciding, requesting, promising, and deciding. So you see the trouble I'm having?

We misunderstand value-adding work as transformative: input > process > output. This transformation model doesn't fit software programming, digging a hole, placing concrete, and making decisions. That is all legitimate work of projects. Capturing that works as making and manipulating miss the nature of the action on projects. The nature is not intrinsic; nothing has intrinsic value independent of some customer for the work. The nature of our work has as context the concerns and standards of our customers. Context and value is established in conversation. We don't dig a hole, write a procedure, or solve a problem independent of someone wanting it for furthering their own purposes. And, we don't take the action without promising to do so.

Somewhere near Wilmington it hit me. There are the conversations that shape and reshape a future eventually resulting in promises and then there's the work of fulfilling those promises. It takes people to speculate, to make judgements, to request, and to promise. The nature of projects is the human-ness.

Put people at the center& they make the promises and they fulfill them.

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