![[Screenshot 2023-10-19 at 12.06.35 PM.png]] Ask yourself at what stage of our lives do we usually binge drink and what stage do we start our expensive green juice detox diets? At what stage do we plan on spending a paycheck that is yet to arrive and what stage do we start obsessing over our retirement plan? At what stage do we deeply care about what others think of us and what stage do we release our ego and try to treat anxiety and depression instead? Of course, this article would never get to the point if we didn't overgeneralize the complexities of being human. Nevertheless, these are the trends most of the human race leans into. So it should come as no surprise that we see this trend living endemically in any project. It is only kept at bay by a good project management presence acting jointly as nutritionist, motivational coach, physical trainer, etc. to extend the analogy. How many projects have you been on or managed that ended up something like this? ![[Screenshot 2023-10-19 at 12.24.21 PM.png]] "Got it. Projects should be well-planned from the start." You might say, and what an unremarkable point I would be making if that's all this was. "Well-planned" how exactly? We say this proactively but it's often the label we assign to projects retroactively. This takes the burden off of us from even defining what in the hell we mean by that in the first place. "Not so. We identified exactly what didn't go well on the project in our retrospective." There's that word again. *Retrospective.* How novel is it for a team to identify its problems retrospectively? Useful, maybe, but what is the retrospective on how the team "being good" was the critical success factor all along? Look at me with my spare tire, now in my 30s. Is retrospective information that I shouldn't have drank so much beer and eaten such heavy foods really that insightful? But more interestingly, why on earth was I *surprised* by seeing my health visibly change in the mirror as I coasted into my 30s? We have primary care doctors. We have all kinds of vitals. There were plenty of system components in place in my late teens to give me the clear indicator that I would have this experience in front of the mirror much later on. This goes beyond my older friends laughing and poking at their own guts during my teens and telling me, "just wait! It's gonna happen to you too." I mean a sufficiently more responsible version of myself at 18 could have implemented a strategy to avoid this and measured with the help of blood tests and medical experts to ensure I was steering away from this risk. Now here's the twist. I thought I was that version of myself. I became a vegetarian in High School, and a full-blown vegan early into college. For reasons I won't get into here, that was a good start but insufficient. Meanwhile, **my critical success factor was "being good." it could have instead been an external system** that measured my health and behavior markers to determine if I was reaching certain checkpoints along the way to dodging a sudden weight gain. Similarly, we bring these habits into projects, we end up with the same sloppiness. We're getting the tickets closed in the sprint, so that's good. We made a timeline and communicated it out to everyone, so that's good. Then here we go again. The project doesn't end well and we correct ourselves. Actually we weren't good but we learned lessons! > [!faq]- Are you just describing Lean methodology? > Shh. But where were our regular health checkups? What vitals were we actually taking? If we were taking vitals, what vitals were we not taking that would have triggered risk information? Probably what we want looks something like this: ![[Screenshot 2023-10-19 at 1.05.51 PM.png]] But this is still a little idealistic. Notice we end the plan right on the planned end date. Does telling someone they don't eat well or exercise enough usually do the trick? Of course, a protocol needs to be followed when health measurements stray from their baseline. When I was living in Manhattan, I took a blood panel showing I was deficient in Vitamin D. I learned I wasn't getting enough sunlight with my infrequent excursions into nature as a city-dweller, so the protocol was to take Vitamin D supplements. On the next health check, my Vitamin D was healthy. I had a system but I also coupled it with a corrective protocol. ![[Screenshot 2023-10-19 at 1.15.55 PM.png]] Are we done? Let's test this. Eighteen-year-old me started a plan by going vegetarian. If you asked me at the time, "do you have rigorous and frequent health measurements?" I would have said, "yes" because I was going to the doctor at some frequency and taking stock in their wisdom to some degree. If you asked me, "Do you have corrective action protocols to pass the next health measurements?" I would have looked at you funny and said "why are you talking like that?" Do you see what's going on? We're in a retrospective! We're back to our old bad habits of looking at the past and telling ourselves that we were young and naïve and thinking that making the mistake was a fair price to pay for learning from it this late. It's not. Here's what we were actually doing: ![[Screenshot 2023-10-19 at 1.32.57 PM.png]] Being a good project manager is about embracing the endless quest for information. We never have enough of it. If your project's health grades aren't passing, your project needs corrective action. If they *are* passing, that means your health grading itself needs corrective action. ![[Screenshot 2023-10-19 at 1.35.18 PM.png]] This is going to be more art than science, but the bottom line is about saying things like: "I'm going to avoid having a gut in my 30s because I started a vegetarian diet in my teens. What *else* might I need to consider to make sure this doesn't happen?" It's also about asking myself, "So far, the information I've gathered tells me it's working. What *other* information might I not be considering?" And because we can't always know the unknown unknowns we'll still find ourselves realizing we missed something after the fact, but having frequent health checks are still our safety nets. We can still add rigor to our health checks sooner rather than later. At the end of the day, "being good" starts with having a healthy relationship between our protocols and our systems.