Respect, understanding, trust, responsibility, growth all these words mean different things in different cultures. People from one culture may be acting respectful, but the interpretation of another person is disrespectful. When people feel dis-respected they have to act to save face. A great Global Project Manager knows dis-respect is a root cause for meaningless conflict, and preempts negative with a positive attitude. The leader uses vision to bind diverse stakeholders to a common goal. For example: Some of us might eat spaghetti with a fork and spoon, some of us might eat ramen with chopsticks but for this project we are going to join hands and get it done together. As a team we need to invent our own shared understanding of how to communicate. For example how quickly to respond to emails or requests for information. This is best done by communication.

Shareholder management is a concept that simply says that the owners of the company are the number one metric. The president of the company makes authoritative decisions like a Military leader and controls the resources to maximize profits for the owners of the company or the Shareholders. The concept is simply maximize profits for the Shareholders.

Why do we use “Stakeholder Management” on Global Projects? Why not just follow the simple commands of the leader above us? Stakeholder Management utilizes the concept of Salience. Salience is relative importance based on context. Stakeholder Management is complex and it has the goal of Maximizing value. Stakeholder Management assumes that we can align the organizations Business Values and the End Customers values. How we do that is by understanding where both dimensions will be in the end. The team creates a complex quality matrix that traces the process of creating value back to the origin.

In Global Project Management the Customer is King. The project manager facilitates complex matrix management by getting the different cross boundary people together. Face to face is recognized as the best way, but of course we can utilize technology and modern cloud computing to approximate as a virtual meeting. The Global Project Manager fosters innovation by getting disparate specialists to recognize the links in the chain. The Global Project Manager helps the team to build the network.

The team needs to recognize that the next person in the the process is the Customer @Saladis. The process or network customer has the responsibility to clearly communicate what are their metrics for success. The process or network “vendor” has the responsibility to confirm that they understand. The team members are simultaneously transacting as vendor-customer. Sometimes they need to be merciless egotistical bosses that demand the correct grade and quality. At the same time they need to be entrepreneurial capitalists that engineer value to fulfill their customers orders efficiently. How do we do this?

Clarify Requirements

Manage Expectations

Continuously Improve

Do you remember, the Culture of Greed? This culture was epitomized by Bear Sterns, Lehman Brothers and other investment banks as valuing money over any other metric. Today, there is a technological culture that can transcend national borders. For example; social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google +. Children growing up today anywhere in the world are using the same devices, downloading the same apps, and hanging out and watching the same YouTube videos. People are sharing the same values. The lessons we can see is that Culture is Dynamic. Culture is dynamic and is always changing. The problem is culture and conflict. @Ajamal 2008 “Culture may be a significant factor in project failure and culture is not widely reported in project management literature.” How can we create Global Project Culture? The answer is by cultivating conditions for “emergence.”

Global Multi-Cultural Projects are more complex. This is real complexity caused by many unknown variables: Culture, Communication Methods, Language, Clear Vision, dis-location form multiple time zones… this is the opposite of  people that can pivot easily and adjust their project when they work in small teams that are co-located. Global Project Managers may smile when they hear antidotal methods of how to be agile. Simply communicating across time and space causes ambiguity and delay. Ambiguity causes confusion, re-work, more delays and mis-trust. While there are no silver bullets that will solve all of our problems, our dream solution is to have people who are separated by time and place to act based on knowledge. How do we do that? Global Project manager have to learn how to improve their performance of soft skill, multi-cultural stakeholder management. My Key Point is we have to Create  ”Global Project Management Culture” for People to Flourish.

The problem is “Requirement” is that which is required. In the beginning, before scope planning requirements are “Candidates”. The process of creating Scope Validates the Candidates. After Product Scope is baselined, those Validated Candidates are  ”Requirements”. Semantics matters and being precise is important.

If we approach our stakeholders and we explain to them we are collecting requirements. What is the expectation of the stakeholders? If we ask them directly “What are your requirements?”.  How about if that stakeholder’s requirement is not included in the Scope of the Project? Or other situations If someone asks me to list everything that is required, it does not have enough granularity. What we really should be doing at this point is setting the expectations of the stakeholders and creating the environment for a breakthrough to emerge. The metaphor is collecting requirements is an exploration like Great Jazz Music.

To manage stakeholder expectations we should initially frame the scene as “Exploration.”  Jazz is a form of music that is typical of leaderless exploration. One of the key basics of jazz is improvisation. Like skilled project managers Jazz Performers may interpret a “tune in very different ways, never playing the same song the same way twice.” Jazz, however, is often characterized as the product of democratic creativity. Once the Scope is baselined, the Project Manager should exert more control by integrating requirements candidates with change control. This is more typical of continuous improvement.  But in the beginning the project manager should foster creativity by creating multi-disciplinary relaxed environments for requirements to emerge. Human Interactions before detailed data.

Contemporary Japanese Project Management @Ohara 2006 describes the “value creation paradigm.” Japanese system thinking answers the questions “What is the value gained by managing projects?” they believe human interaction is dominant.  The Japanese answer is the breakthrough to Kaikaku Project Management. KPM is defined as the synergistic; Kakusin (innovation), Kaihatsu (development) and Kaizen (improvement). The owner/entrepreneur initiates innovation to create future business value. @Ohara 2006 Kakusin (innovation) means the radical type of comprehensive breakthrough by uniting all layers of a new combination of knowledge and wisdom.

Returning to the Jazz theme; the players need to find the base rhythm of what the product of the project will be. The song may start out as a standard. The sax player, the piano player, the guitar player, the drummer. They all need to understand the musical feeling. But to be “Jazz music” players need to take some chance with new music, never heard before. This exploration is supported democratically and creatively. The breakthrough is when the all the players expands into a new musical  direction. This is breakthrough creativity.

The team orchestrated by the entrepreneur who is taking risk by investing money and time, set the scene. The Project Manager assembles the multi-disciplinary players. The Project manager guides the exploration to innovation and maximizing business value. The core product development team begins by offering their requirements candidates or their musical notes. These requirements candidates may be messy, incomplete and ill formed. The Project Manager needs to curate these candidates, but also create conditions for creative exploration.

This is related to Systems Thinking @Senge 1990. “understanding how our actions shape our reality”, “we can shape our future”. Systems thinking helps us see how our own actions have shaped our current reality, thereby giving us confidence that we can create a different reality in the future.

It may sound obvious to many, but on global projects good access to the key stakeholders may be difficult. This creates uncertainty. Deeply understanding what is the business value and risk tolerance of the key stakeholders is critical. This is the critical element of human interaction. People perform projects. By creating good environments humans can modify their requirements candidates and democratically create and modify new requirements. This is Stakeholder Management. This is Joint Value Creation.

Asking someone “What do you require?” or Brainstorming as an exploratative team “When it is done, what is really going to make you happy?” or “We all know time and money are driving this project, but if you could have anything you wanted what would you have?”. The Project Manager can create some easy wins, by identifying the requirement candidates that truly matter. How can a Project Manager do this in a global setting?

Recognize Teams National Cultures
Accept different Mindsets
Respect and Tolerate diversity
Adapt Leader ship style for team culture
Trust the team
Manage Conflicts
Coach people
Form Cohesive local teams
Form Cohesive virtual teams

Recognize information needs and gaps
Collaborate on a Team Charter or Rule Book
Master Communication and Information Distribution Methods
Facilitate effective Brainstorming
Acquire Knowledge from all stakeholders
Share Wisdom, Insights and Perspective
Act Proactively to Remove Barriers

An early step in a project involves getting people together and finding out what do people imagine the project will look like when it is done. This is a fuzzy boundary line. Some may have a formal business analysis provide detailed reports on the reasons and build a business case. But ultimately the person who will accept the product will judge the quality.

In Japan, Quality is Experience. Shopping in Ginza, is a little uncomfortable from my perspective of a small town Colorado boy. In Durango, there is no formality to shopping. I pick, take to counter, pay. The clerk hands me my change and receipt and puts it in a bag. Head out the store hop in my car and drive away.

In Ginza shopping is personal. The clerk welcomes you by bowing and saying welcome the moment you step in the store. The employee’s have perfect uniforms and smiles. The service is impeccable, with the very humble form of language spoken softly. In English we have polite form, in Ginza they use super ultra polite form.

The process is strange to me, because the Experience makes me feel like Royalty. The process of exchanging money is very formal. The money is placed in a tray. The clerk will bow ever so slightly to receive your money. Your goods are carefully wrapped and packaged. The packing is Crisp, Sharp, Clean and carefully inserted in a bag. The bag is taped, and the handles are carefully taped to make it easy to hold. You must accept the bag before you receive your change. Your change is counted twice crisp and clean. The clerk hands you your change and bows. As you leave, the door man and the clerk will follow you out of the store and they will bow deeply to you as you leave the store.

This is an Example of “Quality is Experience”. For Project Managers understanding the expectations of our customers or users involves a deeper communication than reading a report on business requirements. When we are collecting candidates for requirements we need to be answering questions from people with different perspectives. Adopting and remixing agile memes I came up with this way how to do it. Make sure you can answer this question from your stakeholders point of view.

As a <Stakeholder>

I {need, want, nice to have, reject} <what>

So that <Why> it fulfills the objectives.

When it is done I expect to {see, feel, measure} <What>

As Project managers we should not only understand the data and the facts, but the dense and feeling early on. If we can provide the time and space for people to communicate, dream and collaborate we create a library of creative imagination. When project managers are collecting requirements candidates, we should wear a Curators hat.

Done well, we should have some crazy ideas that everyone knows will never work, as well as some standards that have worked well for along time. As curators we need to be able to document and trace the artifacts we have in our library and imagine how our users view them. A wide spectrum of ideas may uncover complexity, but on Global Projects it is the hidden Assumptions that people have from their cultural experience that we desperately need to share.  These intangible requirements, may be messy, difficult to say and harder to document. That is the job of the project manager to create the time and space early in the planning path for these ideas to emerge. On global projects we should never assume that because we experienced something in our own culture, another culture shares the same experience.

Why do we want to spend time collecting and curating crazy dreams of our stakeholders? Uncovering the real requirements early on, prevents us from making costly, difficult changes further down the road. Cost of change in the beginning is low, at the end of a project finding out that our customer was is expecting to experience a different level of quality at the end is very expensive indeed.

Architectural Cast Glass in the World Financial Center. The Park Hyatt Hotel in Shanghai boasts the highest hotel in the World. It is a stunning building. The building is perfect in the mysterious Shanghai night.

The entrance lobby is simple with architectural cast glass. The glass is clear with some motion in the waves and texture.

The Elevator cases have a brightly lit cast glass header. There is some beautiful Chinese modern sculpture.

We can feel that there is something special in the lobby by the sounds of the air in the elevator shaft.

Once you are in the elevator the motion is very soft. The elevator is the fastest in the world. From the first floor to the 92 floor only takes moments. The major feature is a red lantern light.

Once you reach the lobby floor for the Hotel. The first striking features are the architectural cast glass panel. The surface is a complex clear glass texture.

The face is fractured planes; the planes are organic as if they were formed deep underground. The lights are purple and from behind. The view to the outside is dramatic, with glimpses of the Jin Mao Tower below. The combination at night with mysterious fog, enveloping the Tower and the Purple refractive cast glass panels is incredible.

Reminds me of starry nights staring at the Milky Way.

The open plan exposes the core of the building. The wall decorations are mostly architectural Cast Glass panels. The Open Kitchen has White Cast Glass Panels. Enjoy the beautiful Toni Chi design at the top of the world. Contact us at East Asia Portal, Ltd for Architectural Cast Glass

The Woman Eating Grapes

Lalique Women Eating Grapes with Man Playing Flute, Architectural Cast Glass

Lalique Women Eating Grapes, Architectural Cast Glass

Lalique Man Playing Lute, Architectural Cast Glass

LaLique Women Arms up Man Playing Flute

The stunning piece is of a woman eating grapes while a man plays the flute. A dove is flying and the grapes frame the scene. Nature worship is a theme of Lalique. There is an exquisite beauty in the movement of the figurines. The Art Nouveau lightning bolt hair and the bountiful grapes. I imagine Aphrodite and Pan playing the lute. Lalique is the master glassmaster from the 20^th Century. Lalique was not only famous for his exquisite Jewelry, but for his Architectural Cast Glass.

Lalique Dragonfly Woman

The Lalique Millennium Hotel piece is frosted glass blocks. The relief on both sides. The glass is in excellent condition, the caulking between the cast glass is showing some age, and should be restored. There was a couch that was back up against the glass on the lounge side.  I advised the security guards on duty to keep the piece better protected.

This is a treasure and is museum quality. Considering that collectors pay millions of dollars for Lalique`s work it is great we can walk in and see it easily. Stop by the lobby of the Millennium Hotel and enjoy! Or watch the home movie.

Lalique Women Eating Grapes with Man Playing Flute from Robert Higgins on Vimeo.

One day I hope someone will stop and admire Robert Higgins`s Architectural Cast Glass Reliefs.

In Part I we looked at Social Networking, In Part II is an evaluation of  current visualizations.  The point has been made that we can use the enormous visual bandwidth to think.  Part III is going to add some more evaluations of current Visualizations and Conclude with an example of how we can use existing open tools to gather and visualize data for our projects.

Evaulations of Current Visualization Technology

First we all know there is no escape to Death and Taxes, so where does the US taxpayer money go?  If you don’t know than glance at the US Budget 2009. Or how about a real time map of US Stimulus Spending.

A 3 dimensional visualization of semantic language is the “Visual Thesaurus” .   This Thesaurus is novel because it allows us to locate words that are related in terms of closeness in 3-d, we can browse and explore them in a very intuitive fashion.  There are many other proprietary solutions  Tableau Software is very interesting.  It has the ability to combine data from many different sources for example spreadsheets and databases, the output is very nice.  You can publish interactive visualizations to the web.  This software shows great promise for the enterprise user due to the powerful combination.  You can download a free trial.

Adobe Flex is a development tool that enables developers to create clean Spring Graphs that are interactive.  There is also a JavaScript Visualization tool kit that can produce some Radial Graphs, Tree Maps, Hyperbolic Trees and Space Trees.   The visiual human project is a kind of spooky way to view a person.

The ubiquitous of visualization now is incredible we all know google earth, micosoft live earth, but how about NASA World Wind an incredible view of our solar system.  You can view the Mars Exploration images.

Musically, If you have an account with last.fm you can use this tool LastGraph to generate personal graph of your personal music history.

Some more links to Academic Reseaech on these concepts Online library of information visualization environments. Multi-V Hierarchical Clustering Explorer

One of my personal favorite places to spelunk around visually on the net is in The New York Times Visualization Lab.   A personal Favorite is The Ebb and Flow of Movies: Box Office Receipts 1986 -2008.  Be prepared to devote some time to this one to be able to understand the simplicity and the beauty of such a visualization of data.  This is a fabulous way to explore information.Glen B Allerman discusses the uselfulness of visualizing complex data at Hearding Cats.   The beauty of it is; the intuitive grasp of the big picture with the ability to drill into the granularity without having to stop and think.  Some of the software behind NYT is IBM.  IBM Many Eyes is open for uploading datasets and sharing.  IBM Many Eyes is deceptively powerful.

EPIC systems has a very nice Trend Compass which is an interactive charting tool that can model the results as they change with a movie time line.  Gapminder exploits this to very nice effect, a very famous presentation at TED by Hans Rosling in 2006 exploited this type of data visualization motion.

Challenge to Project Managers

The problem is why with all of these beautiful ways to communicate do we still draw little pictures on napkins to manage our people on projects.

PMBOK Fourth Edition Power Interest Grid

This is a simple Visualization of Stakeholder Influence over time I created in Google docs in about 20 minutes to expand this static graph. Play with it change the colors and the size and add a Trail to G by clicking on it. Can you imagine using a static graph again?

There are a few places to go for inspiration.  Twitter has an open API or Application Programming Interface.  We are begining to see some interesting uses from the data sets. Malina will analyze your twitter messages.  This is an example of this Open Social Network Analysis.

There is some connection between Stakeholders.  Lets just say people.  My question is since we can’t measure motivation directly how can we manage motivation?  Especially, on distributed teams?

Social Network Analysis of Twitter User Easy to spot Network Nodes

The reason we want to measure this as Project Managers is Motivation.  I was particularly inspired by Kailash Awati and his vast knowledge and his ability to stimulate positive dialogs, one post in particular Managing participant motivation in knowledge management projects . The subject is Motivation.  If we can locate the Connectors “the people who link us up with the world … people with a special gift for bringing the world together” we activate them as Salesmen.  If we can locate these connectors on our projects, we can also have a way to gauge interest.  We can also reduce the Complexity of Communication Channels on our projects to a discreet manageable set.

To restate from Part I This is related to recent information how Google cancels an incubation project.    The New York Times interview of  Jeff Hueber “When evaluating nascent projects, Google takes a hard look at interest – and in these cases, the interest simply wasn’t there… They were not especially popular with customers; they had difficulty attracting Google employees to develop them.”

How can we do this?  I haven’t done it yet, but I am planning to do it.  I will use Google Forms, to create a form asking stakeholders to choose from a list of people that they know working on the project.  From that point I will mash it up using perhaps Javascript or IBM Many Eyes there are many open options to securely and easily create this communication managment artifact.

Conclusion

Success is related to connections;  the critical core connections, the quality of those connections and the interest of the ideas of those connections.  If we can focus our management efforts on people who can connect and spread good information we can be more successful.  By using existing Visualization Technology on our Projects we can exploit the Enourmous bandwidth for Visualizing Peoples Influence on our Project.  The goals are to identify the Connectors, reduce the Communication Complexity, Measure the Interest and Motivate People.

Lets Visualize Peoples Influence on Projects by Robert Higgins is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at blog.eastasiaportal.com.

Dynamic Interactive Visualizations

Leonardo da Vinci (1452 - 1519) 'The eye, the window of the soul is the principal means by which the central sense can most completely sense and abundantly appreciate the infinite works of nature

In Part I of this series on visualizations we developed a compelling reason how success is related to our people.  To summarize:  Success is related to peoples connections to each other,  not only their  connections but the critical core connections, the quality of those connections and the ownership of those connections.  In the second part we are going to  delve deeper into the current technology for visualizing information.

The purpose of this Part II blog post is to evaluate current visualization and interaction techniques.  Dynamic Interactive Visualization will allow us to abstract the information, effectively analyze data and make decisions.  This is an area that is undergoing tectonic shifts and new techniques are evolving every day.

PMBOK- Project Management Book Of Knowledge- Stakeholder Visualization

First, lets make sure we know who are we talking about.  We are talking about specific people on projects.   ‘A stakeholder is a person or group who has a direct interest and impact on the project outcome and determines whether the project is a success or not’ (Kathy Schwalbe, 2006) .  These people expect that something will be delivered.  Understanding what people want and communicating is the fundamentals of carrying out a project.  PMBOK recommends first we discover the people who can influence a project the most.  Second we classify these people according to their impact. Finally, we rate their interest.

As a starting point we can easily see Figure 10-4 that the Stakeholders who are in the Manage Closely group will require the most time.  For example H and F.  This 2-d image is static.  It can be easily generated on a napkin. The PMBOK guide does not detail how to measure Interest or Power so it has a subjective quality.  Experienced Project Mangers can often gauge interest similar to how Sales People can get a feel for their clients.  But Communicating this to other people, or across cultures may be more challenging.  The PMBOK  describe the  fundamental concept.  This process is as critical as it is universal; discover, classify and rate.

According to Figure 10-4 Visually we can easily see who we need to devote time and effort communicating with.   But we are looking to the future and how we can propel our projects forward naturally, by creating dynamic self illuminating visual information.  I argue that the best way to grasp and communicate about complicated complex project social knowledge, is by using the enormous visual bandwidth available to us.

An Analog tool to visualize stakeholders can be as simple as a chess, checkers set.  This type of very low tech item can be used for example in an environment in which computer skills are very limited.  Or it can also as a part of brainstorming team to capture what a group is thinking about.  The idea is that the pieces would be symbols of stakeholders, the board could be laid out similar to the “Figure 10-4″ from PMBOK 4 page 294.  The people can be elevated by placing the chess pieces on the checker pieces to create relativity.  String or colored pipe cleaner could be used to represent the connection between these people so that the critical nodes can be clearly identified.  An out of the box solution for sale commercially is Net-Map Tool Box.

How Infuential are your stakeholders?

This has great potential as part of a team building meeting and with a little creativity this can be imported with cameras both still and video to share and capture the knowledge.

Doctor Lynda Bourne of Stakeholder’s Circle has a Stakeholder specific visualization tool.    This Project Management Tool is specifically designed to identify, prioritize, map, engage and monitor people working on a project. From the literature it shows a type of visualization known as a  “Tree/Radar Map”.

More on academic research in this type of visualization is being done at University of Trier this visualization technique can be used ‘to represent weighted dynamic compound digraphs, which express a sequence of directed and weighted graphs where nodes correspond to leaves in a hierarchy’.

Time Radar Trees.

This is a technical description but we can easily visualize how the stakeholder nodes of influence can combine with actual activities and events in a project.  The inner Radar graph could be the project and the outer radars or thumbnails could be the stakeholders.  Personally for me, This type of visualization is eerily similar to what I imagine in my mind when I am cognating project social abstracts .  How can we consider the holistic project details and how the stakeholders influence ebbs and flows over time?  It is very difficult for us to express these abstract concepts using only words or pen and paper.

Academic  Research is rapidly evolving and new tools are being announced every day.  I have spent quite a bit of time exploring Doctor Tamara Munzer’s research.  This research is very detailed and informative.  Extreme granularity can be found in her Accordion Drawings.  This research is exploring how to visualize complex information for example `a system designed to support the comparison task for large trees of several hundred thousand nodes`.  This is fabulous research to process information and find the patterns and most likely could apply to the ultra complex mega projects.

Email Post Historical Visualizations

MIT has an interesting tool they used to view email and frequency over time, you can view some of the images from this project  Visualization of Social History.

Unfortunately it is not interactive, this is a concept that Project Managers could adapt for usage.

Stanford’s University Pat Hanrahan .  His presentation on Self Illuminating Phenomena is particularly inspiring.

Self Illuminating Phenomena Down Wash Voritces

I am a fan of a visual that can show our project status update dynamically based on some quantifiable metrics that describe our stakeholders expectations.   Ideally, we would like to have something in which we use all the tools available to us a project managers such as interviewing, modeling, analyzing relationships to let the Phenomena Self Illuminate.  As Doctor Hanrahan describes “A self-illustrating phenomenon is an image that is generated automatically as a result of an experiment. More importantly, it is an image that exposes the phenomenon behind the observation.”  This is precisely what we are looking for.

Part III to follow…..

People are connected to Project Success

Specifically, we need to understand the people that are connected and critical.   The problems we face is complexity.  Complicated projects span countries, time zones and cultures.  As Project Managers we need to set a goal to expand our knowledge.  We have to develop an artifact that dynamically communicates peoples hidden relationships in an explicit visual image. How can we do this?  We are going to explore.  First, where is mankind in terms of social networking? Second, visualizing social networks.  Finally, what would be the ideal solution for Project Managers.

"Rapid Growth in Soical Networks"

Why?  The BBC reports that each friend you have increases your earnings by 2%.  Perhaps, another reason is related to some research completed in December 2008.  ”Dynamic spread of happiness in a large network“.    The conclusion is not very surprising.  Peoples happiness depends on the happiness of whom they are connected to. Sounds pretty good!  An intangible quality of a successful project is the happiness of the people working on it.  If we look at the social aspects of game success in World of Warcraft, a study shows that it is not the quantity of people that determine winning.  Online winners are more likely related to their interconnectedness or closeness.

Cirlce of Friends

From the February 26th Economist Anthropological studies show that people can only mange about 150 friends.  Internal Facebook studies show that the most active stable groups are remarkably small.  Men will leave comments with about 17 people and women about 26.  We already know this we usually say something like “small circle of friends”.   Think about it…. If you are a man, are there 15 people you stay in close touch with?  For a women, do you have more than 25 close friends? Tight small groups of people are the most stable. Information spreads through our networks.  Some people think that the information will spread similar to a virus.  It will take some time to build and than once it reaches the tipping point it will accelerate until it peaks and then retrace.  The way these ideas spread are related to the type of person.  Gladwell describes 3 types of people.  “Connectors are the people who “link us up with the world … people with a special gift for bringing the world together.”  Mavens are “information specialists”, or “people we rely upon to connect us with new information.”  Salesmen are “persuaders”, charismatic people with powerful negotiation skills.” This is related to recent information how Google cancels an incubation project.  The New York Times interview of  Jeff Hueber “When evaluating nascent projects, Google takes a hard look at interest – and in these cases, the interest simply wasn’t there… They were not especially popular with customers; they had difficulty attracting Google employees to develop them.” So we can see that.  Success is related to connections;  the critical core connections, the quality of those connections and the interest of the ideas of those connections.  If we can focus our management efforts on people who can connect and spread good information we can be more successful. More to Follow……

Ryoan-ji or ” The Temple of the Peaceful Dragon” is on the north-western edge of Kyoto. When we walk into Ryoan-ji temple grounds, we can feel peace because it is nestled in the trees and mountains. We can stroll along the 600 year old paths beneath cherry trees next to tranquil ponds and fragrant gardens.

When we enter the tea house there is a special type of Japanese Dry Rock  Garden pronounced “karesansui”.

Ryoanji Dry Rock Garden

We can view rocks emanating from sand waves. We can ponder the emptiness and the spaces between the rocks.

We also learn there are 15 rocks. What makes this somewhat special is that we cannot view all 15 rocks at once.

All of us; who have seen this garden, want to see all the rocks.

Legend has it from the proper perspective the enlightened master may view all the rocks.

We can view this as a metaphor for good Project Management Communications.

People can see parts of a project very clearly. Different people can see different parts. Good Projects identify the people involved, and their perspective in relationship to success. People are important for a happy satisfying project.  To foster creativity; an essential ingredient for new ideas, people have to have expression channels. People, may never see the other rocks.  Different people will need to know the nature of the other rocks and conversely they need to be able to express the fine grain detail of the rocks they can perceive.

Good skills involve understanding the layout of the garden, where the best position is to see all the rocks in the garden. Communicating with people means understanding not only what they know but what they don’t know or cannot see. Good skills also involve knowing the nature of the information.  By “nature of the information”, I mean that what to say, when to say, how to say and if to say is essential.

So our job as Project Managers or Masters of our Gardens is to become enlightened and to express the nature of the rocks that are impossible to be seen by others in the proper place and time. We can visualize that The Master Japanese gardeners designed these special places as lessons to let us contemplate knowing and not knowing.

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Photographs of Ryoan-ji dry rock garden by Frantisek Staud

Positional photographs of Ryoan-ji dry rock garden.

Article by Robert Higgins