Older, but no wiser

It’s several years ago; I’m at a management training seminar; the subject is virtual teams. The couple of dozen delegates sit motionless, all eyes to the front, totally absorbed in the originality of the ideas they’re hearing unfold before them – and fascinated by the skill of the presenter. Full of enthusiasm, he faces them, talking continuously and with much animation, moving between whiteboard, overhead projector and flip-chart, stopping briefly to sit with one leg hanging over the corner of a table, then restlessly moving on. The only time he’s in one place for more than a few seconds is when the constraints of the media demand it, as now. He stands beside the flip-chart; both he and the chart squarely facing the audience, yet he reaches round the side and writes, with speed and energy, all the while holding the audience firmly in his gaze and so unable to see what he’s writing – and the words he’s writing are a totally different set to the words he’s speaking; both continue to flow at the same relentless pace. Is this the original man with two brains?

No, it’s Dr Eddie Obeng, maverick management consultant. A few years ago I was fortunate enough to attend an extensive development programme which included several sessions like this one with Eddie.

His subject was, as I say, virtual teams, and the context was project management. Like all good consultants, Eddie had a four quadrant model and was talking about how the approach to running a project varied depending on which quadrant you were operating in. He took two criteria – did you know what you were setting out to achieve? and did you know how you were going to achieve it? – and used them as the axes of the model, with a simple yes/no category for each:

^ ^ ^ Do you know how to do it?	What? - No How? - Yes PAINTING BY NUMBERS	What? - Yes How? - Yes MAKING A MOVIE
	What? - No How? - No FOG	What? - Yes How? - No QUEST
	Do you know what you want to do? >>>>>>>

I hope I’m not infringing any copyright here; as far as I can remember Eddie didn’t claim any special rights to the idea at the time, and in any case he’s well acknowledged here.

Traditional projects, where you know both what you want to achieve and how to achieve it, are easy to grasp and yield to traditional management methods. Eddie called these Making Movies – you have a script, a paraphernalia of movie-making, a director who knows exactly what he/she wants (and lets everyone else know it) – all you have to do is get on with it (setting aside trivial details such as budget).

But although you know what you want to achieve, you may not know exactly how to achieve it. These are Quest projects; like the search for the Holy Grail, you know what you’re looking for but have no idea where you’ll find it – you just have to keep on searching, turning over stones, asking questions.

Then there’s process-type projects. You’re not sure where you’ll end up, but you have a set of instructions to follow and something will pop out at the end. Like painting-by-numbers, filling in the numbered shapes on the canvass with the appropriate colour and, magically, a picture appears. Blogging might be a bit like this - a process without a defined end result.

But it’s the last category that is most interesting. You don’t know where you want to end up, you don’t even know how to set off, all you know is that you can’t stay here; it’s not the right place, you wont survive; you need to be some place else. So you stumble around in the fog until you hit upon something. And maybe that something gives you some kind of clue; you stumble around some more, finding more clues, and little by little coherence starts to emerge. You find links between some of the pieces – although not all; some are red herrings. But the more you explore, the more pieces of jigsaw you find and so the fog gradually starts to clear. Just a small clearing in the immediate vicinity at first; further away its still thick but close to there’s what looks like the start of a path. The secret with this kind of project is to keep on looking; keep moving around; keep trying new ideas; don't stay put. But at some point, to make progress, you have to migrate into one of the other quadrants - after all,as the saying goes, if you don't know where you're going, any path will take you there.


I had a narrow escape the other day. I nearly rushed off down a path that appeared out of the fog in front of me; I nearly applied for a job as “Manager, Performance and Accountability”. Thankfully, I came to my senses at the last minute. I had fallen into the trap of believing that the only options available were those that lined themselves up neatly and came knocking at my door. Extending Eddie’s analogy, I risked becoming an extra in someone else’s movie. So for the moment it’s back in the fog, but I keep finding clues; the fog’s clearing and it even seems I’m beginning to see a way ahead.

More “projects” than I like to admit, be they personal or business, fall into the fog quadrant. But I reckon blogging dramatically accelerates the whole stumbling around process; it enables clues to be found far and wide; maybe even allows you to explore several paths all at once.

I’m off to stumble around some more and see what I bump into…