Revelations on the Road
Maybe I’m just really tired, but there’s a weird revelation dancing in front of me, and I don’t want to do anything I have to do. I just want to figure out the meaning of this half-formed idea in my head…
I started reading a galley of “The Punishment of Virtue” by Sarah Chayes. She was an NPR reporter dispatched to Pakistan to cover the invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001. Years later she figured out that the pressure of coming up with an accurate story every week for All Things Considered, or whatever else, meant they got the story wrong. That’s interesting enough, and remind me to follow up on that some time, but as I sat on the bus trying to read, my biggest problem was keeping track of everybody’s name. With this mundane issue to hand, I started reviewing in my mind all the other books that caused the same problem. I didn’t get far.
Don’t be disappointed, because something else happened next: Last night’s Project Management class came back to life in my tired brain. Some phrase in the book suddenly evoked a whole range of compaints I haven’t been able to voice. Kandaharis have a lot of cash. Every interloper throughout history had to pay them off. They run a toll booth on the Silk Road. They’re like the children of divorce, but transported to the Great Game of Central Asia. Everybody wants to buy their love. Nobody ever succeeds for long. International redevelopment aid goes in, the goods are sold, somebody pockets the money, and no workers are hired. Projects don’t accomplish anything, but managers sign off on it anyway.
I nearly fell out of my seat on the bus. How could I have been so blind?
About Class: We got a damn good score for some piece of crap I handed in at the last minute. Meanwhile, I get really good scores on all my other work, so I’m in good position if the group project flops. I was wracked with guilt because I should have been working on it much earlier. That way I might have seen where more work was needed; where I needed to direct our efforts. I just handed in what there was when I reached the deadline. The more I worked on it, the more questions I had. A spreadsheet with budget details is a far cry from a couple hours of informal discussion. The professor’s comment boiled down to “Do you guys even know what you’re doing?”
Of course not. We don’t have a clue. This isn’t the way to find out, either. I thought I was skilled at breaking apart tasks and figuring out details. I just do what comes naturally. I’ve never really known why I do anything. I’ve never been the source. I want someone else to tell me why. That’s why I wanted to preach to my group about the Customer. When there’s money involved, there’s a Customer. Let the Customer decide on goals, then I can start my work. This is the central struggle. On the one hand, I’m only going to get good at doing it by practicing it. But on the other hand, I need to see it happen. I can’t make up fictions about Project Management until I’ve lived through some real examples. Suddenly the thought of doing this in an eight weeek class seems terribly misguided.
I won’t know what I’m doing until I can tell it as a story. There were things I couldn’t enter on a spreadsheet. We might have mentioned in passing: We can omit X, because of Y. So where do I mention the things I chose to omit? The assignment doens’t say anything about that. But once again, I know what I think is important, and it doesn’t match what I’m being told. At the same time, I haven’t lived with that truth long enough to be sure I can defend it. It’s not a matter of self confidence. I have to have confidence in the equipment, and I won’t have that until I’ve accomplished simpler goals using that equipment.
Posted by Evan Bittner Tue, 16 May 2006 12:55:00 GMT
