OTT Issue #13: Persistence vs. Pestilence ??????

Every year we get these really cool orb weaver spiders at our house. They spin gorgeous webs and eat mosquitos, so we’re fans (despite the undeniable fact that they are WELL above the size that I usually tolerate spiders in my immediate vicinity).?

Here’s one of them getting after some prey:?

We like our periodic pets. Sometimes we even give them names. But this year, one of the spiders went too far.?

It built a big, beautiful web right in front of the sliding glass door that leads into our kitchen. Right at face height.?

Happily, on the first day it showed up I noticed it a millisecond?before?I walked into it. This is lucky for all concerned, because I suspect my warm fuzzy feelings toward orb weavers would have changed if one had been on my face.?

We tried ducking under the web for a day or so, but then I moved the screen door to take advantage of a lovely fall breeze and accidentally destroyed it. The very next day the persistent spider had rebuilt it…in exactly the same spot.?

I issued warnings to the family that the spider was back, but the new web only lasted a few hours before my unfortunate husband walked through it. (Again happily, the spider happened to not be home at that point, so his positive feelings about orb weavers are also still intact.)

But by then he’d had enough of the implacable interloper. He caught her in a plastic bowl and moved her to the big tree in our backyard, well away from the kitchen door. Two days later our door remains web-free.

Now the insistence of this arachnid has gotten me thinking about the fine line between trying hard to get what you want, and being a pest.

If we KNOW that our team could work better together, but nobody else is interested in making process improvements, what should we do??

We could be like the spider and persist, throwing new meetings labeled “Daily Standup - MANDATORY” on the calendar or building optimized project plans and backlogs in the new tool we found.?

People might tear down our meeting invites or accidentally destroy our Agile projects, but so what? The rightness of our knowledge can sustain us until one day our web holds and we feast on mosquitos…or our teammates finally agree to the transformation we've been advocating for.?

If we ultimately succeed and things change for the better, we could argue that we’ve won the day.?

But should we persist no matter what? What if we’ve irreparably damaged professional relationships and blown all our political capital before any real change happens? Do the ends inevitably justify the means, or could we have gotten the same results with less collateral damage??

Let’s see what our orb weaver has to say about it. Here she is again, in case you forgot what she looks like:

Let’s imagine that she KNEW that my kitchen door was the absolute best place to catch mosquitoes. She saw a webinar and read a case study where a spider just like her tripled her nightly conversion rate by simply building her web in a doorway. This was clearly a must-do project.

In the execution phase, she did everything right. Good solid construction, full coverage of the space, optimal build time – all the boxes were checked. But she didn’t coordinate with her stakeholders (me and my family). We weren’t bought in. Heck, we didn’t even know about her new idea. Even though we tried to work around her plan once we found out about it, we eventually destroyed it (more than once) just by doing what we always do.?

Nobody was malicious; we just wanted to use our doorway. But she never even had a chance to succeed.?

Not only that, her persistence made her a pest. She went from being a welcome, if slightly creepy, presence on our porch to kind of a nuisance. She went so far that she lost her prime web-building real estate and got banished to the tree.?

Obviously a real spider doesn’t have a great way to negotiate with humans, but in our thought experiment world let’s pretend she could. If she had presented us with her ultimate goal – go “off the trail” and into a doorway in the hopes of tripling her mosquito-catching conversion rate – we would probably have worked with her on an alternative approach.?

Doors are hard to not open, but what about a window? We don’t go out of the sliding door from the bedroom nearly as much, so how about that one instead??

Had she focused on building a little consensus instead of a lot of webs, maybe she’d have a belly full of tasty snacks and I wouldn't be fending off mosquitos while trying to write this on my porch.?

So where’s the line between persistence and pestilence? How can you tell when your vision for exploring uncharted territory is ahead of the curve, and when it’s downright unwelcome??

Answering that question could make the difference between tripling your mosquito-catching conversions, or getting banished to the backyard.

- Andrea