Work, in Plain English

On the About page of this blog, I wrote that I manage projects because I love them. It’s still true.

Work Breakdown Structures and Gantt Charts are valuable, powerful tools, but it all pales before the beauty of the project itself: Its potential outcome, and the possibility that it will become more than what we envisioned at the start (and I mean more in a very delightful, very exciting way).

By loving a project, by feeling passion about a project, the tools and techniques are reduced to their proper place and proportions, as simply tools and techniques. They become malleable, so that they can more easily be adapted to the project’s purposes. They become disposable, because it is much more quickly clear when a tool or technique is not contributing to a project’s success.

I’d like to suggest that if you can’t find passion in your heart (or gut) for your current project, you might want to start looking for it. No need to go nuts, but even just a little vision, a little wonder, can transform a project from acceptable to spectacular.

Here’s a suspicious sounding idea: If at all possible, weave your personal dreams with the desired outcomes of your project. Sounds selfish, doesn’t it. I certainly wouldn’t recommend admitting it to anyone at work, either. But if you can weave genuine personal meaning into your work, you will reap creativity, resourcefulness, vitality and yes, even efficiency.

How to remain balanced? How to not turn into a PM Napoleon? Remember that human relationships are the other part of what makes it fun. As human beings, we’ve accomplished amazing things because most of us enjoy doing things together (at least some of the time). Get people on board, honor their efforts, build trust, and listen.

Check out how Adobe Illustrator is using del.icio.us to organize web-wide tips and tutorials! They’ve integrated del.icio.us directly into the CS3 knowhow palette. I haven’t upgraded yet, but I can still go to the web page and pick through the links… or go to http://knowhow.adobe.com, where the demo allows me to play with the actual knowhow panel (first, I’m going to look into how they organized groups of tags under subtitles — very cool).

Of course, in the spirit of social bookmarking, networking, etc., if you’ve found or created any web content you think other Illustrator users would value, just tag it “for:knowhow”. The Adobe team will review it, and then add it to the collection.

Considering del.icio.us as a tool for managing your projects? See my detailed how-to, and a collection of links to other helpful web pages on the subject.

We learn a tremendous amount about ourselves when we look at advertising, because marketers and advertisers are only interested in what works, and what works fast. Because we are changing, advertising has to change, too.

Sure, there’s a range of approaches, from the most base and manipulative to the truly radiant and inspiring. So the range of what we can learn is as wide. Some people would prefer to learn only about the sellers, and there is a lot to be learned about them… but these folks are missing out on the real treasures.

Marketing and advertising, adhering to practicality, are mirror-like reflections our evolving cultural values. It’s just that they tend to make us look a little fatter than we’d like.

‘But it’s a competitive world!’ I am told again and again. Certainly it is, and a very messy one I should say. Look around. And I should add, ‘It was also once a disease-ridden world and we are curing it.’
—Dorothy De Zouche 1945, teacher

with thanks to Alfie Kohn, who cites an expanded De Zouche quote in the notes for his article, “Only for My Kid: How Privileged Parents Undermine School Reform” (Phi Delta Kappan)

The premise of this post, so beautifully summarized in the above quote, is that competition is an idea whose time is done. And more than an idea, competition as a motivator, and as a lens through which we have been observing and evaluating our world, is not—and perhaps never was—the grand, driving force we have thought it to be.

Competition appears to work as a motivator because it gets people scurrying. Parents can get their children to clean their room if they point to a sibling’s tidier room (although the first few times we try it, we must pointedly add, “Look! Billy’s room is so much cleaner than yours!” Why? Because small children need time to learn from their parents’ cues that it’s not OK that Billy’s room is cleaner). In the workplace, managers can induce an atmosphere of fierce activity by announcing that the person with the most sales will win a cash prize.

Although there have been valuable innovations inspired (at least in part) by someone’s drive to outdo someone else, the truth is that competition is a limited and limiting motivator. All that scurrying isn’t necessarily productive, and if it is, it’s generally short-term — it’ll end abruptly when the contest ends. For monthly or quarterly productivity races, it will spike in the last few days before Award Day and bottom out the rest of the cycle.

What have we been told about competition?

1. Competition promotes excellence
2. Competition drives innovation
3. Only losers criticize competition
4. Competition is the pillar of capitalism
5. Competition keeps prices low
6. Competition is a (or the) biological motivation of all life
7. Competition is the driving force of evolution
8. Men are naturally competitive

Who am I to question why scientists — otherwise rightfully cautious of assigning human characteristics to non-human subjects — would think nothing of attributing avarice (for food and sunlight) to plants and animals? For that reason (and for brevity), I’ll leave that part of the list alone.

As for most of the other myths, here’s an excerpt from “No Contest”, an article by Alfie Kohn, the controversial and/or beloved education speaker and writer. Kohn sees a world beyond competition, and he’s got piles of research to back up his assertions:

David and Roger Johnson, professors of education at the University of Minnesota, have performed 26 separate studies to determine whether competition or cooperation is more conducive to learning. The results: cooperation promoted higher achievement in 21 of the studies, while two had mixed results and three found no significant differences.

Alfie Kohn, “No Contest”, INC Magazine, November 1987.

Kohn goes on to demonstrate that instead of innovation and excellence, competition handicaps both children and adults by eroding their self-esteem as they turn their attention to external sources of approval, and by isolating them from each other, since a teammate’s or classmate’s gains represent their own losses in the race for the “prize”.

Motivated by competition, Billy and his sister are now room-cleaning enemies. “Whose room is cleaner! What? Help you with yours?” In the grown-up world, any person on the sales team who might have possessed a helpful inclination would now have to be a saint or a martyr to express it.

But without competition, won’t our creativity vanish? Won’t we lose our motivations for excellence and innovation? Won’t the world market collapse?

In “The Case Against Competition”, Kohn answers:

Most of us were raised to believe that we do our best work when we’re in a race — that without competition we would all become fat, lazy and mediocre. It’s a belief that our society takes on faith. It’s also false.

There is good evidence that productivity in the workplace suffers as a result of competition. The research is even more compelling in classroom settings.

Alfie Kohn, “The Case Agasint Competition”, Working Mother, September 1987.

His suggested remedy is, of course, cooperation, and:

The foundation of cooperation is what social scientists call “positive interdependence”: a cooperative group sinks or swims together. In practice, that means all group members work for the same goal and use the same resources. The result is a shared group identity and a sense of accountability that comes from having others depend on you — a powerful motivator indeed. (In a competitive environment, the only stake others have in your performance is a desire to see you fail.)

Alfie Kohn, “No Contest”, INC Magazine, November 1987.
A far more comprehensive treatment of the topic is available in Kohn’s book, No Contest: The Case Against Competition.

Pursuing the research for this article (you’re invited to explore my del.icio.us/workinplainenglish/competitionmyth page), I found workplace anecdotes and studies describing good productivity rates turned exceptional with the removal of competitive incentives. To be sustainable, it also required the unraveling of competitive culture, especially when it was extended to management.

In another article, I’ll share a few working examples that will hopefully inspire you to see the world from a different perspective.

Competition is a pair of tinted glasses through which we perceive our surroundings, and then set out to interpret what we have seen. If we were to stop teaching it, if we were to stop using it to manipulate our families, clients, co-workers, employers, employees, target markets and neighbors, the positive changes to our quality of life would be fundamental and pervasive.

At our weekly unschooling families dinner, we were at the rant phase of the conversation, probably sparked by a reference to national testing of school children. Like the sound of a clear and finely cast bell, this off-hand comment continues to ring in my ears:

“Testing has nothing to do with genius. If you could test for it, it wouldn’t be genius.”

I stumbled on SlideShare this morning, while poking around the blogsphere (thanks to David Armano at Logic + Emotion). My greatest delight is that it allows me to share presentations I’ve created in Apple’s Keynote, rather than having to convert them to PowerPoint, which is like squeezing a porcupine into a nylon stocking.

I’ve already sent ecstatic emails to friends and colleagues, but wanted to further share the wealth by mentioning it here.

… works just like embedding a YouTube video (slide show by brownerfirst).

In the meantime, I’ve found some excellent material for my “competition vs. cooperation” quest, which I’ll post within the week. If you just can’t wait, you can always check del.icio.us/workinplainenglish, which continues to serve as a living collaboration lab.