One of the reasons I’ve enjoyed my work is that I tend to always think of my projects as a two for one deal.
For example, I am the Owner’s Project Manager for a new university building, but the real project is learning how to be an OPM on a major capital improvement construction project.
The first project gets me paid, the second project gets me excited to go to work every day.
I wonder if this has something to do with a pattern in my career where I’ve made a change every few years. Once I’ve learned the craft offered by a company, I sense a calling to move on, especially after I’ve repeated the process a few times. At that point, the hidden project of learning the firm’s specialties has lost its appeal since I am well familiar with it.
Maybe a more productive pattern would be to find deeper projects within the projects. Once I’ve got the process down and internalized the typology, I should buckle down explore other the real projects behind the project. Once I understand, I need to find a source of satisfaction in a project beyond just learning something new.
Just asking such a question is scary because it’s a question with no easy answer. But, who knows, maybe this is where the path to mastery might begin.
Unfortunately, my daughter got my genes for nearsightedness. In her teenage years, my wife managed to avoid getting glasses by doing a regular exercise of staring into a pitch black room.
Try getting a seven year old to do that regularly!
Now that I’ve broken forty and my eyesight seems to be on a second round of degeneration, I’ve been assigned this task, to sit in a dark room with the girl for twenty minutes a night.
Fortunately, technology.
We have been listening to audiobooks, courtesy of the library, and she has been plowing through the Magic Treehouse series. Having listened to several of these books, I have two notes.
First, it seems quite negligent for Merlin and Morgan le Fay to send the two children to gratuitously dangerous quests. For example, Jack and Annie were sent to Pompeii the morning before the volcano erupts. If Morgan was going to ship them back in time, couldn’t she have set the dial back a couple days?
Second, it is awfully convenient that the kids are able to communicate with whoever they come across. Obviously, such a conceit is necessary for the stories to work, but I wonder if an immigrant would have written these books. It requires a certain centeredness (or lack of otherness) from being part of the majority culture to have the imagination to ignore such a plot hole. At least the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy had the Babelfish.
I should add a third note since these books aren’t for me. My daughter loves these books. She’d (visually) read them all in an afternoon, if we let her, but the whole point is to go through them in these night time sessions. Plus there are plenty of other books for her to read – including the non-fiction “Magic Treehouse Fact Checkers” which accompany many of these books.
I should add a fourth note several months later, having completed the series. These books truly aren’t for adults. The plotlines were so cringeworthy that I had to start listening to my own podcasts during these sessions. That said, my daughter still loved the books and they exposed her to plenty of moments in history that she wouldn’t have known otherwise.
She’ll still occasionally revisit the ebooks on her reader, so I think that ultimately remains an endorsement for the series. Fortunately, we’ve now moved on to Newbery Award books and that is much more palatable for me.
After finishing The Magic Treehouse series, I borrowing several Newbery Award winners for our audiobook listening sessions. My daughter read the synopses of these books and was intrigued with the idea of someone who could talk to animals. I was a little surprised by her choice, since she strongly prefers girls as her main characters. Then again, the other books with female protagonists were too scary for her preference (she doesn’t care for tense plots), and she sure does love animals.
At first, it was quite a bit of a shock to go from Mary Pope Osborne’s clear voice to the sounds of a deep, gravelly British man. However our ears caught on quickly and we both enjoyed the story. It was a wide ranging adventure, both in town and out in the world. Given its age, I was worried it would dabble with unsavory stereotypes, but Hugh Lofting managed to avoid such traps. In all, a good time.
My daughter certainly thought so, she borrowed all the Dolittle books from the library (there are quite a few) and plowed through them, even ones that without the illustrations. This book was a wholesome, delightful romp and I see why the Voyages of Dr. Dolittle continues to hold sway a century after its initial publication. The Magic Treehouse introduced our girl to chapter books, but this was her first true excursion into the deeper world of books. Not a bad way to start.
Any child who is not given the opportunity to [meet Doctor Dolittle] and all of his animal friends will miss out on something important.
I’ve been toying with creating a communication protocol for my projects. I would hand it to my Architect so they would be liberated from thinking about how to communicate so they can focus on what to say.
Anything you send to someone that isn’t under your contract should CC: me. I’m not worried about being buried under emails. If I’m not in the salutation, I’ll scan it and file it away quietly when I get around to it.
Telephone
Use Phone Calls liberally. If an email exchange might ping-pong more than three times, then pick up the phone. Make sure to document the conversation with a follow up email.
Don’t bother with voicemail. I never check those.
If it’s really urgent, Text me. Or call my cell twice in a row.
Meetings
Videoconference preferred to save on travel time.
All Meetings should have an Agenda prepared X days in advance and Minutes distributed within Y days. (This is painful on purpose, to ensure the benefits of the meeting matches the cost).
A great meeting has three key elements: the desired outcome of the meeting is clear ahead of time; the various options are clear, ideally ahead of time; and the roles of the participants are clear at the time. … I think that’s the single largest source of optimization for a company: the makeup of their meetings. To be clear, it’s not about fewer meetings because meetings serve a purpose. Rather, it’s key to improve the meetings, themselves. A lot of my efforts focus on teaching people this framework. Ironically, I find that most people are just challenged by that stuff.
I read these four examples a year ago and haven’t referenced them, but they have been fermenting in my brain. They links are sorted by alphabetical order of the company, but do the kids say these days? Retweet is not endorsement.
I started in a small office, hand drafting with a telephone, using dial-in internet. Less than twenty years later, I have a cellphone and a computer, both of which have high speed internet and instantaneous access to email and MS Teams.
When we talk about progress, its easy to forget that the world that we saw slowly changed in real time is just the basic “normal” for those who grew up after the technology became widespread. These younger folks grew up in a totally divergent communication environment, and I believe that a communication handbook may be the best way to bridge the divide, even if it seems stodgy as hell.
I drafted this series of OPM.0’s to test the newsletter concept before making a public commitment. I needed to verify that the newsletter wouldn’t be a major commitment beyond what I had been spending on the blog. It seems doable, though I may need to reassess after I return to the office and lose five hours a week to the commute.
Heading back thru time
In testing the newsletter concept, I went through my archives over the first half of 2021. Fortunately, blogs are built for exactly that sort of leisurely activity.
Unfortunately the real world is not so accommodating. In private practice, it was hard to keep up with the onslaught of deadlines and follow up projects. Since I wasn’t in management, I was never briefed on the financial performance of our projects. More importantly, we rarely had time to analyze our process and examine lessons learned, much less conduct post occupancy reviews after the building was long completed.
Theoretically, life in the government could give us a little more time to explore such things, but frankly the world moves too fast for such luxuries. As soon as one project is completed, the new batch of legislatively approved projects are placed on our desks.
Assuming that there is value in learning from the past, there must be a way to solve this problem. I haven’t tried to crack this nut just yet, but to speculate I’d guess that involve a regular practice of taking careful notes paired with and formal reviews. The notetaking must be systematic and extremely easy (to avoid losing the thought). The formal reviews would force one to analyze the raw data at regular intervals and provide an opportunity to immediately disseminate the information to colleagues so they can learn vicariously.
Do you have any systematic practices to learn from the past?
Hit Reply and lets chat!
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My OPM notes from May
I’m a huge fan of Seth Godin, even though I wasn’t overwhelmed with his most recent book, The Practice. Even so, it still comes highly recommended, even if I don’t think it is absolutely mindblowing like his masterpieces The Dip and Linchpin.
I wrote this the morning before our first punch walk for Substantial Completion. There were some jitters before the big event, but as I predicted, life kept moving forward.
This is not exactly OPM related, however this may be my most influential read of the year. So I must shout out the Bed of Procrustes by Nassim Nicholas Taleb.
This month’s posts ended up being very book centric. Death by Meeting isn’t a “must read classic,” but it is worth reading for anyone searching for ideas on optimizing meetings.
One from the Archives
At my last firm in private practice, I instituted a post-mortem meeting with my architect-interns after every major deliverable. It worked really well for my team, however I haven’t been completely satisfied with how it has worked with my architect consultants as an OPM, partly because it is unreasonable expect that I will get the unvarnished truth when they are concerned that their next project might be at risk. As such, I need to lean hard into making notetaking super easy and to enshrine a regular practice of intermediate reviews for self reflection.
… and a public domain photo.
Image of a stain glass window on board liner TSS AWATEA, known as the ‘Queen of the Tasman Sea’. It was a luxury liner that serviced the trans-Tasman route. Samuel J. Hood
They’re also great at franchising those good ideas.
But holy god, they are exceedingly mediocre at turning good ideas into good games.
Usually their development process is just good enough if you embrace the game on its terms (Aquarius, Nanofictionary). It’s telling that Zendo is the only great game to go with their brilliant concept of the Icehouse pyramids (and you could argue that Zendo barely a game).
When you make a habit of inhabiting the “good enough” zone, you’re bound to drop a deuce and this was a stinker. I have no idea what is the appeal of Loonacy, much less how it has managed to be published in its multitude of iterations.
I don’t regret the purchase, the game was on sale at steep discount and the pictures are pretty enough. I’ll keep the game around so maybe I’ll find out what I’m missing one day.
We haven’t played this game since the initial plays a couple months ago. I should get my wife and mother in law to play a four player game with my daughter to find out what I might be overlooking. Or maybe not. Odds are pretty high that this will be yet another inhabitant in my big box of small un-played card games.
I came across an interesting blog post Hardship and Meaning by Daniel Miessler postulating that hardship might produce a certainty of meaning that seems to be lacking among more prosperous folks in America.
I found the premise reasonable, but I’d curious about the levels of depression among the non-immigrant poor. Is their experience like immigrants, given their similar economic struggles, or is it more like other natives in the middle class?
Non-immigrants are often blind to the strangeness of their native cultures. Aside from the luck of being born into the middle class in America, I think that I’ve been able to reasonably manage the ups and downs of life because my childhood gave me a visceral experience that American culture is merely one option among many choices. My parents were deeply religious and we attended a white church. Even though everyone was in tight theological alignment, our family maintained a cultural identity quite distinct from most of the congregation.
While being “other” came with many awkward moments while growing up, it was also greatly beneficial to viscerally understand the concept of culture as an artificial construct. What seems “universally natural” is only normal to one’s own people. The children of immigrants are the fish that see the water.
In that vein, I tend to find myself drawn to other immigrants. One of the more interesting examples is a white coworker with whom I had developed a close relationship. It took a few years before I found out that his parents were from Europe and that English was not his language at home. Even though our political views were quite divergent, this basic experience of “otherness” was an unspoken foundation of our relationship.
Conversely, I’ve also found myself having a surprisingly difficult time relating to some immigrants who moved the States as adults. They often carry themselves with a certain self assuredness that comes from being part of the majority dominant culture during their formative years. In spite of other cultural similarities, I can have a difficult time viscerally relating to them.
It is a dangerous game to play armchair psychologist (especially in public). I’m certain that growing up as “other” inflicted psychic mental trauma that I’m ignoring, and I should also note that I’m lucky since the burden of my minority is quite mild compared to the stereotypes that other groups endure. The contentious online world usually focuses on the downsides of such an upbringing, so I hope it was worth exploring some of the benefits.
It’s not fun growing up different, but there is deep value in knowing that no normal is universal – every group of “we” is a little bit weird.
A few weeks ago, I borrowed the audiobook of the John Minford translation of the I Ching, which was a good way to go through all the introductory material, but really quite lousy once it started to go through each hexagram.
I’m not a believer in the divine per se, but I do believe in the unconscious. This translation by Thomas Cleary seemed to be the most straightforward, least western new age woo woo physical copy that was available at the library.
It is a lovely pocket paperback. Just the straight text with a short introduction and minimal notes at the end. It was good to first meet the I Ching by walking (often confusedly) through the text without any commentary to clog the flow.
The simplicity of this format helped me wrap my head around the framework of the book. It let my mind start to feel the contours of this world, the hexagrams flowing one after another, flipping back and forth.
Even so, I must be admit that the damn book (the original, not the translation) is a word salad. This isn’t a bad thing (I suspect that’s why it continues to speak effectively to querents), but there is no denying that the text can feel like bunch of images that don’t make much coherent sense.
Then again, it’s been making sense for millennia, so there must be something there. Does the emperor have no clothes? Maybe not this time. I sense that there is something here, even though the pieces are not logically tied together.
Ultimately, I’ve purchased a copy of the several translations for long term reference. This small book was a good introduction to the I Ching and will stay on my shelves until someone puts it on hold at the library, but I don’t feel a need to purchase my own copy.
Since writing the first draft of this post, I have gotten really into the I Ching. I appreciate this translation as in my personal history since it introduced me to the book. However, I don’t ever reference this translation when I conduct a reading. I’ve stopped pulling it off the shelf, preferring my Minford, Wilhem/Baynes, Lynn, Richter, and Richmond versions. There is something to be said for being available at the right time, but I fear that may be the best one can say about it.
I’ve been a fan of reforming meetings but have had difficulty thinking about how to do it.
I enjoyed the book Read this Before the Next Meeting, a short book by Al Pitampalli, which emphasized decision making and preparation before a meeting. This was a good start because the advice fits nicely with my preference to solve problems one-on-one, but it was a myopic in its proposed solution.
Death by Meeting takes a different tack by emphasizing the need for meetings is to unearth and expose conflict. This allows all players to put their views on the table for an open resolution. It is an appealing approach, though it will take some thinking in how to implement this, especially as a lower level employee within the organization.
The other key point of the book is to categorize the meetings: five-minute huddles, weekly “tactical” check-ins, monthly strategy sessions, and quarterly off-sites. These categorizations don’t match my professional experience as a bit player outside of the C suite, however I like the idea of categorizing one’s meetings, so that each type can be fine tuned for fit.
When I was in production architecture, I would always push back against management’s assumption that a draftsman could just cut-and-paste old details. No one should start from scratch, but fact one needs to draw another detail means that this is a unique condition. There are no one-size-fits-all solutions for such problems. Even so, details should be categorized and sorted, careful organization is the art of putting together a set.
Similarly, I think my role is to find a proper categorization for the multitude of meetings that I encounter in my position. From there, I need to envision how each of those meetings could be made more effective. Then I will need to consider my position (as low man internally, or main client on projects) to figure how to encourage change.
Along with streamlining asynchronous communications, I think this will be a pretty interesting exercise for the next few years.
In the half year since I wrote the first draft, I’ve written an extended blog post about weekly check-ins for projects and started a weekly check-in with my supervisor as well as a bi-weekly check-in for my digital signature side project at the office. I have not made any revisions to the weekly Owner Architect Contractor meetings, though I have been holding them as video conferences (with job walks on a separate day) which I think that works fairly well.
It looks like I will be deep in design for the next year, so it will be interesting to see how that process might be managed differently in a post-pandemic videoconference centric world.
I went on a binge, playing Innovation on BoardGameArena.com. This was the first week since finishing graduate school where I stayed up past 1am every night.
The implementation of Innovation on BGA is quite good and it is really convenient to have a community of players around the world. This is especially true when you join the “Arena League” where you are always just a few minutes from having an available opponent.
I think that a proper league ranking system would just give you a number, maybe some sort of ELO score, but that would be a bit too dry. Instead BGA created six levels to gamify the journey itself. Once you’re in the system, there’s always yet another rung on the ladder, culminating in the “elite” level with the final goal to reach number one.
It didn’t help that I lucked into a couple easy wins over “elite” players in my first few games. Like a good casino, this beginner’s luck sucked me in hard. Subsequent games put me back in my place, being properly crushed in most of my games against top ranked opponents. There were a few games where I was “just one turn away” from victory, but that is the point of competition at the upper levels. One wasted turn is what separates the elite from us mere mortals.
In the end, I made it to “gold” in that week, It was quite gratifying to know that my obsessive gameplaying against myself during the quarantine of early 2020 turned out to be decent training. Still, I must quit this Arena. It’s too easy to click play again, and again, and again.
This was a fun one week fling, but it would have made a bad marriage. I slept only a few hours every night and was on the verge of being chronically sleep deprived. The effort to become truly great would have been monumental. It’s one thing to use your actions wisely; a whole other level of to never waste an action. The juice isn’t worth the squeeze.
A few days after stopping BGA, I’ve started to feel a deep sense of relief. I had been in the grips of a addiction and didn’t realized it. Just like quitting Facebook last summer, I hadn’t realized how deeply this thing had dug its tendrils into my subconscious until after I stopped.
It’s a little embarrassing to go on a run bragging about kicking digital addictions, and then admit how easy it is to fall right back into it. Even so, I am happy to report that I’ve stayed off this drug for the two months after that week of gluttony. I’ll log onto BGA on Friday nights to play with my friends, but that’s it. To be clear, this isn’t a feat of will power, but a consequence of getting really into the I Ching. It’s a good reminder that it is a whole lot easier to quit for something better.
