Have You Enjoyed Yourself this Week?
February 12th, 2008 by AlanHi. I’m Alan Mossman, a consultant based in the UK. Hal has invited me to contribute occasional posts to RPM in the areas of design, safety and collaboration.
One of my profs at Uni, Stafford Beer, asserted "A system is what a system does". So why would anyone create a system that in Hal’s words “turns strangers into enemies”.
Will Lichtig addressed this issue in an article for the Fall 07 American Institute of Architects Practice Management Digest. In Projects as Patients, Will suggests a scoring system for project health — should we call it the Lichtig Score? Four of the categories - Collaborative Planning, Reliable Promising, Unaccounted-for Constraints, Safety - have clear criteria.
The questions for the equally important fifth category, Mood, are not so straight-forward to answer:
- To what extent is the team positive?
- To what extent is honesty and trust evident?
- To what extent is the team learning and improving?
- Is morale improving, steady or declining?
- To what extent are team members being open and honest with each other?
- Are there barriers between trades and professions and if so How high are the silo walls?
- How long or short are tempers?
- To what extent are team members collaborating?
This reminded me of a question that David Adamson uses when he visits sites on a Friday afternoon. David was Estates Bursar at Bristol U and then Director of Estates at the University of Cambridge, both in the UK and he needed to know how the projects being delivered for him were going. The question he’d ask was:
Have you enjoyed yourself this week?
A simple affirmative is, he says, a good indicator of project health. Anything less was an indicator of current or imminent crisis. One of the delights of this question, like many of those that Will proposes, is that it is a whole system enquiry.
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February 13th, 2008 at 8:11 am
Welcome Alan and thanks a lot for your post.
Team behavior and feelings are a big concern for me too and I keep talking and discussing about these in workshops and with customers. I run a practical exercise in workshops where I ask people to define what they are looking for in a nice holiday trip in terms of feelings, interests, fulfillment, and have them eventually conclude that a project is just the same as those holiday trips, a journey from A to B and a journey that we have to enjoy to enjoy the destination. Basic human needs do not change when we are at work; I believe that we try to fulfill the same needs, be it on a trip to Bali or on a trip aiming at delivering a new building or a new aircraft or a new process. So «have you enjoyed yourself this week ? » is quite a relevant question to ask and to check upon in a project, since the answer has a lot to do with project success, both at the material and at the perceptual levels.
I voted for your manifesto too. I always listen to Hal (hehe). Like you, he also gives very good tips to enjoy our day, our week, our month, our whole life on the project journey. Very happy to have met you too and looking forward to future posts and exchanges.
February 13th, 2008 at 7:54 pm
In the NSW Government standard construction contract “GC21″ reflection on team performance is ‘required’ (see http://www.managingprocurement.commerce.nsw.gov.au/contract_forms_gc21/gc21_4_general_conditions.doc#_Toc185219625)
In my experience getting in the spirit of ‘cooperative contracting’ as we term it, is variable: some do lip service, others embrace the concept heartily. It’s not quite “have you enjoyed?” but it does ask teams to reflect on team relationships and performance.