What’s In A Name?

Pulling The Thread: What’s In A Name?

Fun fact - on the very first day of my corporate career, as a naive graduate in a humble project office, I was handed a 5 page long list of acronyms.

A whopping 80% of these acronyms were project names.

But it’s not the acronyms that’s the concern here. It’s that 100% of those project names were related to what the project was DELIVERING, not what the project was ACHIEVING.

That is; the WHAT, not the WHY.

Surely there’s an interesting thought experiment here - - - Consider for a second how differently you would measure and govern a project named “Unlocking Capacity within Team X” vs how you would measure and govern a project named “Australian Application Database Project”.

The key standout here is one of mindset.

By naming our projects around our scoped items - we’re locking ourselves in. We make the selected solution our key focus. This means our success metrics will naturally be built with that specific solution in mind.

So, how do you measure success of the “Australian Application Database Project”? - Likely something around ‘delivering a database that enables applications from Australian residents, ideally on time and on budget.’

But what about a project named “Unlocking Capacity within Team X” - well that’s a much broader mindset. You’re not locked into any one solution, in fact, you’re likely to bundle a number of things together to collaboratively achieve your target. Plus, measuring success is simpler and more obvious: ‘net hours saved within Team X’.

So I pose the question to you this week -

How much is your project name pre-determining your project’s fate?

A Quick Cheat-sheet on: Sources of WHY

While we’re talking WHYs, a few weeks ago I asked a colleague what his top 5 most common strategic objectives were across his clients, which had me thinking - if I were to apply the transformational lens, what would my answer to that quesation be?

Here’s where I landed. Across the $11B+ in change I’ve lead and guided, the most common objectives I see are:

• Efficiency / Capacity
• Impact/Improvement (i.e., to demonstrably change conditions for a target audience.)
• Growth
• Satisfaction
• Sustainability

So if you’re stumped on defining your WHY - take a look at the list above and see if any of those apply.

And A Quick Note: How Humans Change

I’ve recently dived into David Goggins’ book - ‘Can’t Hurt Me’. It’s a fascinating, and heartbreaking read. However, there was one quote at the start of the book that stood out for me:

“Human beings change through study, habit and stories.”

In an organsiational context, we rely on ‘study’ (i.e., training) an awful lot, ‘habit’ a little (i.e, reinforcement programs), and ‘stories’ almost never.

Perhaps we should rebalance that.

Final Thoughts

Just a quick note - I haven’t spoken about the growth of the newsletter much over the last few months, but the readership has grown steadily and consistently all year.

So if you’re a long-timer, glad you’re still here! And if you’re a new subscriber, thank you and welcome.

If you enjoyed this week, please let me know by hitting like and sharing it on.

See you all next week.

BB