Clarke's Second Law: The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
Arthur C. Clarke (1917-2008), British science fiction author, inventor, and futurist.
This quote was first published on the Ah-Ha-Moments blog on July 3, 2010. In its essence it means that, in order to discover what your limits are, you have to push a bit further than that. Applying it to Project Management, this raises a couple of problems:
- First, why should you care, and
- Second, how can you do it.
Why should you care about taking things to the limit?
One way to check what benefits you get as a Project Manager when you push things to the limit is to check what you’ll lose if you don’t do it. If you play it safe each and every time you’ll certainly:
- Not evolve - if you do the same thing you’ll get the same results.
- Not get better – you may get faster with practice, but you won’t be better by doing the same thing over and over again
- Don’t know how far you can get – if you get a challenge, like an ambitious target date you won’t meet if you play it safe, you have to turn it down
On the other hand, when you push things to the limit you can fail. That’s bad. You can push your team when they don’t want to be pushed. Not good. You can compromise other people’s work by not delivering yours on time. This doesn’t look good either.
So it looks you must take a big risk if you want to go for Clarke’s Second Law. Maybe that’s not such a great idea after all. Unless you can limit the damages… The following practical advices are based on this “limiting the damages” approach.
If you have a project that will produce some results independent from one another, you can try to phase your project so you include on a project phase all the outputs that the project must deliver on time, on budget and with the required quality. Then you can create project phases for the others outputs that are not classified as “must have” - we'll call them the secondary outputs. You can then push things to the limit on these project phases: if it works and you deliver, great!, you’ve learned something, you got better and developed yourself and your team; and if it doesn’t work, the damage is limited to some outputs that didn’t compromise the project’s success.
Discuss your plans
Whenever you take these actions you should discuss them at least with:
- Your sponsor,
- Your team, and
- The people who will benefit the most from your project’s outputs.
This way you can learn a lot about the needs surrounding your project: for instance, you may learn that your sponsor has some personal involvement on its success. In this case it's a bad idea to play around with these outputs.
You may learn that your team is eager to take challenges, which makes it perfect to do some experimenting with.
The one thing you cannot let happen is to have people find out you've been experimenting with Project Management and that the project failed because of that. You must be completely honest and transparent with this, otherwise people will feel cheated and this is something you definitely don't want.
And from here...
I hope that this post has made my point clear: you have a lot to gain on exploring your limits with Project Management but you have to control the damages in case things go wrong. The main thing is to keep alert for opportunities to push your limits and then explore the opportunity with your sponsor and your team.
And take a chance! Even if you bang your head on a wall, you'll learn something from it!