Making Success Real

“No one is taking this effort seriously!”

?It is Time for a Reality Check

I hear that specific complaint from project people more often than I do not!? This comment and my own feeling that frequently matched that comment, motivated me to investigate the reasons behind the lack of support. I found numerous reasons that drove that excuse for failure. This article will address the top reasons for non-support and two simple activities that reduce the chances of that being a valid reason.

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Simple psychology points to the fact that people take things seriously when they believe that they are real (in the present) or have a high probability of becoming real (in the future). When they take it seriously, they act and react accordingly. The reverse is also true. An individual will not take anything seriously if they do not believe it. As obvious as this is, many do not use this as a leading indicator of support.

The Beginning of Reality

Over the course of my career, I worked with different business leaders that provided insight into ways of going from a vision to a reality. Two of the techniques that I continue to use to this day still take me back to the day I was introduced to them.

Give it a Name!

“If it is important…it will have a name. If it doesn’t matter it will go unnamed…”

Prior to this thought being placed into my mind and naming efforts subsequently becoming a required activity, I hadn’t considered the importance of naming. I recall a dinner table conversation with my father, after I made a comment that, “It seems like I don’t matter to anyone!” His response was simply, “If you didn’t matter, we wouldn’t have given you a name!” That was the end of the conversation. It was years later that I recognized the insight that those eleven words carried.

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Naming is important. If it isn’t important, seldom is it given a name. Consider that if an individual is important to you, Among the first things you know about them is their name. Individuals that are meaningless to you are or will become strangers and you do not know their names. Going a bit further into this thought, In Florida where snow is infrequent as best, there is but one words for it. Snow! In the part of the world that icy precipitation is a matter of life and death, i.e. Northern Canada and Alaska, the Inuit have at least 53 different words that specifically describe type of snow related to very specific characteristics of the precipitation and its potential effects on life. To them “snow” and the type of it matters. Floridians see it as a passing inconvenience. Cultures who live in the deserts have absolutely no words to describe snow.

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Without belaboring the point, naming is critical. I had once worked with a team that developed a “cutting edge” machine (for that time) that threatened to eliminate many positions in the factory. During the testing phase, when it was installed on a line, it performed miserably. This baffled the team. When discussing the performance in a meeting, the wise, factory manager, who came out of retirement to start this factory said, “The problem is not the machine, it’s the name that it was given by the people on the floor.” He then scheduled an “All Hands” meeting and announced that this machine was coming to the factory and that its name was “X” (name intentionally deleted) and that calling it anything else would be subject to strict disciplinary action. People immediately began calling it by name, at least in public. Miraculously, the performance of the machine rose to what was expected. I was astounded! When I debriefed with the factory manager, I commented on how amazing simply giving the machine a formal name made a change in its performance. He replied, “The name only made the machine real. What changed was the support that was given to it, by the floor, when they believed that it was real.”

?Naming with Clarity

My next “reality check” came at a quarterly budget meeting. These meetings had evolved to a review of past poor performance and for each shortfall an excuse and a verbal plan for improvement. In frustration, the CEO stood up and declared, “If it not documented, it is not real!” I found the power of formal documentation in taking a project or an effort from hollow talk to reality. If it is going to happen, it needs to happen from the beginning. This concept became refined with my introduction to the Six Sigma and Lean methodologies which formalize the activities with a charter (Six Sigma) or on the A3 document (Lean). When properly administered the document details the importance of the effort and has signatures of the leaders. This gives a boost to the “reality level” of the effort.

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Another discovery occurred as I sat in presentations and heard comments from the audience that included, “I thought this project impacted my department also” or “That changed from what I originally was told”. For every name or title that an effort is given there should also be a brief but precise definition of what it means. I found that formal project managers used “in scope/out of scope” or “in frame/out of frame” activities effectively. I quickly added these to my “reality checks”. I tested the effectiveness of this by asking if they had heard of “X” project? and then what did it mean? If the name and the description did not match, the disconnect needed clarification. My lesson learned was that reality occurs when the name matches the description. When this occurs, the magic begins.

?Making Magic Real

Many perceptual psychologists hold that you will not see something that you are not looking for. Making success real depends on one’s ability to look for it by clearly defining it. If success is obscure, the best image that one will have will be blurry! Clarity begins at the onset of every effort, whether it is personal, or professional. Everyone needs to see it the same.

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Returning to the Inuit example, those who only have words for Thirty variations of the word snow will see the other types, but those Twenty-three will be merged into other words and their independent importance ignored. In that merging, the hose type of snow and the significance and reality of its impact is also lost. In some cases, the loss could be a fatal mistake. If there is a lesson to be learned from this, it is; If it is profoundly important it will have a name and that name means something that is important. ????????

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The Cii is all about making efforts positively significant. Our efforts teach beyond the simple exercises and activities of the discipline, to the tools that support each activity and make it effectively real. Check us out at TheCii.com.

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