Author: George Pitagorsky

George Pitagorsky, integrates core disciplines and applies people centric systems and process thinking to achieve sustainable optimal performance. He is a coach, teacher and consultant. George authored The Zen Approach to Project Management, Managing Conflict and Managing Expectations and IIL’s PM Fundamentals™. He taught meditation at NY Insight Meditation Center for twenty-plus years and created the Conscious Living/Conscious Working and Wisdom in Relationships courses. Until recently, he worked as a CIO at the NYC Department of Education.

The Karma of Postponing Due Diligence

Written by George Pitagorsky on March 20, 2024. Posted in Articles.

There is a trade-off between doing work now and postponing it until you are forced to do it.

The law of karma says that what you do and don’t do causes a ripple effect. So, be careful to avoid the unwanted consequences of putting off review and assessment, risk management, planning, project administration, and resource management work.

Due Diligence

Due diligence is the opposite of negligence. In finance, project, and acquisition management, it is the effort to collect, analyze, and use data to make decisions. Due diligence is the work to collect, assess, prevent, mitigate, and account. In project management, it is the process of deciding whether to pursue or pass on a project based on a risk-reward assessment. It seeks to determine if the project is feasible, legal, ethical, and profitable. From a project and process management view, add planning, regular maintenance, and quality management to the definition of due diligence.

Bypass due diligence and the risk of failure goes way up.

Accounting and Due Diligence

Doing my tax accounting reminded me of the importance of the accounting part of due diligence and the understanding that not doing accounting and regular status reporting makes the rest of due diligence far more difficult than it needs to be.

Every year I resolve to take the time to clean up my data and set things in place for a far easier next year. But it is already March and I’d have to spend even more hours dealing with this ‘stuff’ when I have many other things to do to catch up for all the time I spent on the taxes. Then because I have so much else to do, I do not take the time to regularly do the accounting that would make taxes easy, even if not pleasant.

I postpone the effort and each year I repeat the pain.

Project Management

For one reason or another, we often put off doing unexciting and easily postponed chores.

With the pressure to “act now” and get our projects off the ground, we often find that risk-reward decision-making is given only cursory attention or bypassed altogether. Amid a dynamic complex project with tight deadlines, limited resources, and “problems” the only thing that matters is getting the work done, now. Anything else is a distraction.

This kind of heads-down, undistracted, focused work on a project can be useful. However, if you are working without regularly stepping back, you and your organization will suffer. If you think and act as if doing status reports, risk management, communication, human caretaking, and project accounting are distractions, think again.

Project performance includes Project management. Due diligence during the project means doing:

project accounting – cost and effort tracking, issue logs, status reports
regular quality assurance/process-focused meetings
risk management
quality control
communication
human caretaking (stakeholder management)

Above the project level, in the higher-order process, due diligence means:

process management – making sure the process, methodology, standards, templates, roles, and responsibilities are as best as they can be
portfolio management – making sure that the right projects are being initiated and realistically scheduled to avoid overwhelming resources and taking on projects that are likely to be disappointing.

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The Higher-order Process

When we refer to the project level and above, we recognize that projects are being performed within a higher-order process, which includes process and portfolio management, environmental conditions, and resource management. Both the project and higher levels are important, and they are interrelated. However, given the nature of organizations with short-sighted priorities, the higher-order process is often overlooked.

The higher-order processes are complex and operate in multiple dimensions such as portfolio management occurring in the context of organizational strategy, market conditions, regulatory issues, and more. The benefits and costs of doing and not doing due diligence at this level are not immediately realized. They make themselves known when something goes wrong, and the problem cannot be explained by and resolved at the project level.

For example, your project resources may be taken away and reassigned to another project causing your project to be delayed. If senior stakeholders are ok with the delay because it was factored into their decision to remove the resources, then there is no problem. But if this happens frequently across multiple projects it is a sign that the project portfolio may not be being effectively managed.

If you do not take the time to evaluate the legal, budgetary, risks, and reward factors of a project, the consequences are not felt until the project fails or a regulatory body steps in to put the brakes on. If project performers are constantly complaining about having to do useless work on administrative tasks, it may be a sign that procedures and templates need to be reviewed and repaired, performers need to be better trained, or that the wrong methodology approach is being used.

Fine-tuning or more radically changing the higher-order process affects the quality of individual project performance.

Project-level Due Diligence

Accounting within each project is part of project management due diligence. Every team member, not just the project manager, must allocate time and focus attention on tasks that may seem to be distractions from the so-called “real work.”

Project accounting is done to satisfy regulatory and administrative needs, for example, knowing how money has been spent and resources used. In addition, stakeholders want to know what is going on and how it is affecting their expectations. Will the project be on time and budget? What events have occurred that can get in the way?

But that’s not the only reason. Project accounting sets the stage for due diligence at a higher level. It leaves an audit trail with the data needed to refine portfolio management decision-making and methodology assessment. With project-level reporting comes the ability to look back at what happened to learn from it. Hindsight is not 20-20 unless there is a record to review. Memories are imperfect. How will the data from this project influence decision-making at a higher level?

Commitment and Follow-Through

The bottom line is to build due diligence activities into work plans and commit to following through with effective portfolio management decision-making, raising the consciousness of stakeholders, and ongoing refinement of the project performance approach.

Working Hard, But Not Too Hard!

Written by George Pitagorsky on February 28, 2024. Posted in Articles.

Working hard is applying a high level of effort, being consistently focused, productive and effective, applying emotional, physical, and intellectual energy. Working hard is rewarding, it leads to personal and organizational success.

Some people say, “Work smarter, not harder.” But working hard is not the opposite of working smart. The two go together. Working smart makes working hard more effective. Working hard without working smart leads to working too hard.

Working “too hard” causes fatigue and burn out, it reduces performance, challenges relationships, creates a cycle of emotional reactions like anger and depression. Challenging work becomes too hard when it can’t be sustained. Sustained challenging work, physical or mental, requires sufficient reward, rest, relaxation, and recovery.

Subjectivity

What does it mean to work “too hard”? With two people doing the same work, one might find it too hard and the other too easy.

Some years ago, I managed a project that had a tight time deadline (don’t they all?). We were a core team of six people including myself, all in our late 20’s to early 30’s. For the last month of the project, we were working late into the night, coming in early in the morning, and occasionally doing all night work sessions. We had pretty much cut off our social and family connections for the duration. The work was engaging, state of the art, and creative. The reward was both financially, emotionally, and intellectually rewarding. Team members had bonded, and it often felt as if we were reading one another’s thoughts. We were in Flow. When the project ended, we were both ready for a rest and sad that it was over.

Some family members and friends thought we were working too hard. For us it was a thrilling ride. It’s very subjective. Observers may or may not have an accurate perception of how hard a worker is working in any role as a performer, manager, or executive.

Objective Criteria

We can bring some useful objectivity to the question of what working too hard means by defining the characteristic conditions of “too hard”, to overwork, really means.

Working too hard means there is imbalance among the factors – hours worked, rest and recovery, task complexity, competency, work environment, relationships, mental attitude, and physical condition.

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Symptoms

Overwork is a principal cause of burnout. In my article Burnout: What It Is and How to Avoid it,[1] I identified the symptoms of – “exhaustion, disengagement, and reduced effectiveness.

Exhaustion is loss of energy and fatigue. It occurs when there is too much stress caused by unhealthy performance demands (chronic overwork). It can be a short-term experience following an intensive physical, emotional, or mental activity. Short-term exhaustion can be treated by moderating performance demands and taking rest and recovery time. If it goes untreated and becomes chronic, burnout follows.
Disengagement is affected by a sense of not being cared for by leadership and of the futility of the work. People lose a psychological connection to their work. Involvement and enthusiasm suffer. Performers, whether executives, managers, or staff, just put in their time instead of being actively engaged in their work. self-worth suffers. They become cynical and either engage in unnecessary conflict or withdraw to avoid engaging in meaningful debates.
Reduced effectiveness is tied to both exhaustion and lack of engagement. With tiredness, less involvement and enthusiasm, performers become less productive and less effective. That results in greater stress as performance goals become more difficult to achieve. Greater stress feeds exhaustion and lack of engagement.”

For observers, becoming disengaged with friends and family is perceived as a symptom of overwork. It may be, depending on how persistent it is, and whether overwork is the cause or work is being used as an escape from challenging relationships.

Symptoms are the most objective criteria available. It is up to each of us to be aware of our feelings and energy levels to decide if we are experiencing the symptoms of overwork.

Self-awareness

“Self-awareness is the ability to “step back” and observe yourself objectively to know your behavior, motivations, feelings, values, and desires. It is knowing your personality and the way you display it in your life.”[2]

Your self-awareness enables you to see whether you are working too hard and if you are, why you are doing it.

Doing Something About It

You can do three things about working too hard. 1) You can avoid it, 2) you can correct the imbalance among hours worked, rest and recovery, task complexity, competency, work environment, relationships, mental attitude, and physical condition to stop doing it, or 3) you can continue and suffer the consequences.

You avoid it by establishing a healthy work-life balance. You stop it by identifying the imbalance and correcting it by adjusting your attitude and behavior.

For example, you can balance rest and recovery with working on challenging work for long hours, and intensively. That kind of work is often necessary and can be sustained if there is time for rest and recovery.

A supportive work environment, with space for quiet time, and workspaces designed for the kind of work being performed to provide comfort and ease enables breaks and eliminates unnecessary stress.

Healthy relationships, including the ability to manage conflict and expectations, remove unnecessary stress and enable intensive effort.

Mental attitude is a key factor. If you believe you are working to hard, you will act as if you were. If you believe that you are working hard and are ok with it, you will be most effective.

If your personal situation is creating the imbalance because of workaholism or anxiety about not working hard enough, you are faced with the task of addressing these causes.

If your work situation does not give you the ability to improve imbalance, you are faced with the challenge of making the changes that will protect your health and effectiveness. That may mean taking the risks of standing up to your boss and changing jobs.

[1] https://www.projecttimes.com/articles/burnout-what-it-is-and-how-to-avoid-it/

[2] Pitagorsky, George, “Self-Awareness a Critical Capability for Project Managers”, https://www.projecttimes.com/articles/self-awareness-a-critical-capability-for-project-managers-d23/

Healthy Goals, Psychology, and Performance Assessment

Written by George Pitagorsky on February 7, 2024. Posted in Articles.

A reader reported that the “Motivation: Intentions, Goals and Plans” chapter of my book, The Peaceful Warrior’s Path, triggered memories and painful feelings about performance reviews.

That set me to thinking that the cause of much of the trouble with performance assessment as a part of performance management was psychology and mindset about criticism, coupled with organizational and personal resistance to addressing those issues.

A recent Harvard Business Review article pointed out that

“Performance reviews are awkward. They’re biased. They stick us in boxes and leave us waiting far too long for feedback. It’s no surprise that by the end of 2015, at least 30 of the Fortune 500 companies had ditched performance evaluations altogether. But let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater.”[1]

My reader, a financial professional with a decades long career, reexperienced anxiety about being found deficient, reinforcing her need for perfection and acceptance by others, highlighting weakness and imperfection. Embarrassment, financial, and career consequences, circled in her mind.

As a result, she was triggered by the thought of setting goals and objectives. In her experience they were often unrealistic and rigid.

Others report a sense that they are being evaluated without adequate objective criteria and by people who are biased and, in some cases, unqualified, unprepared, or uninterested. Often the goals and objectives, even those set by the individual performer, are rigid and not adjusted when conditions change.

The Benefits of Performance Reviews

But let’s not just jettison performance goals, objectives, and assessments. Let’s make the best of them, to use them for personal growth and organizational success.

The HBR authors reported that at Facebook “a survey of more than 300 people found that “87% of people wanted to keep performance ratings.”[2]

They realized the need for candid feedback to give employees a sense of where they stand in the eyes of their organization and what they need to improve, and to give the organization knowledge of employee performance to support training, compensation, and hiring decisions.

Add to that the benefits, clarity of purpose and direction, which come from establishing rational expectations in the form of goals and objectives.

What Gets in The Way?

But something gets in the way. Not every organization is as wise as Facebook about optimizing their performance assessment process, including setting, and adjusting goals.

When I look at the issue from a project management perspective, I see three predominant causes of unskillful performance assessment: lack of clear goals and objectives, psychological/mindset issues, and poor process.

In this article we home in on the psychological issues and how they impact and are impacted by the other causes.

Psychology, Mindset, and Performance

There has been resistance to addressing psychological issues in the workplace. But we do well to be aware of these issues because individual psychology influences behavior and behavior influences performance and relationships.

The interplay among individual psychological tendencies and mindsets, cultural and organizational norms, and self-awareness influences performance and makes for a complex system. In a complex system change anywhere can have an impact everywhere.

For example, a project team member may make decisions influenced by fear of upsetting the functional manager who will give her the next review. Another performer may avoid committing to goals and objectives to avoid imagined failure. A project team may be reluctant to commit to objectives they feel are unrealistic and that they will be evaluated against regardless of changes to any number of conditions

In our projects, we see that factors like

Individual anxiety and perfectionism,
cultural norms,
performance processes
attitudes regarding success and failure,
communication and relationship capabilities,
levels of emotional and social intelligence, and
organizational support levels evidenced by allocating sufficient time and attention and adjusting objectives as conditions change,

all contribute to the success or failure of performance assessments and performance management.

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Skillful Performance management

Awareness of and sensitivity to psychological and cultural tendencies enables skillful performance management.

In projects, performance reviews are not limited to individual performers. We assess performance on individual projects and the performance across multiple projects of individuals, project teams, departments, and organizations.

Performance management should be treated like a program with each assessment of a project. Intentions, goals, and values drive performance. When we evaluate the effectiveness of performance management these elements must be considered. If we never evaluate the effectiveness of the program, it is likely to be ineffective. And that leads to less-than-optimal performance overall.

The intention of performance management is to improve and optimize performance while creating a work environment in which performers at all levels of the organization’s hierarchy feel safe and have a sense that the process is fair and objective. Values: effectiveness, kindness, candor, self-reflection, emotional intelligence.

The goal is to enable clarity regarding performance effectiveness through a process of performance reviews which include the assessment of the factors beyond individual behaviors that contribute to achieving optimal performance.

Objectives are to regularly assess the performance of individuals, projects, teams, and organizations to identify opportunities for improvement based upon pre-established criteria and to make decisions regarding the need for training, deciding who will be compensated at what levels, who will and will not be retained, and what organizational, management, cultural, and environmental changes are needed to achieve optimal performance.

Optimal Performance

If the intention and goal is to achieve optimal performance, then we must know what optimal performance means. It means performing as best as possible given current conditions where performance is measured by the ability to achieve desired results – satisfied clients, profits, clean air, healthy and happy executives, managers, and staff.

Next Steps

To move from the general to the specific you need an action plan for your situation. Consider each of these:

Identify a responsible party for performance management – and it can’t be ‘everybody’ even though everyone and every team is responsible for their performance
Educate the staff at all levels regarding the intent of performance assessment and the reality of psychological, emotional, and cultural influences
Set a baseline for optimal performance – objective and realistic criteria that are agreed upon by those whose performance will be measured
Assess your current performance management process – get feedback from the staff, assess against industry benchmarks
Refine the process as needed
Be open to continuous improvement based on ongoing assessment of both performance management and individual and project performance.

[1] Lori Goler, Janelle Gale, Adam Grant, Let’s Not Kill Performance Evaluations Yet, Harvard Business Review https://hbr.org/2016/11/lets-not-kill-performance-evaluations-yet#:~:text=People%20want%20to%20know%20where,recognize%20and%20reward%20top%20performance.

[2] Ibid

Looking Back and Looking Forward to Improve

Written by George Pitagorsky on February 1, 2024. Posted in Articles.

There are many New Year celebrations – Tet, Rosh Ha Shona, and more. Why not make every day the beginning of a new year?

But now we are here celebrating the Western solar new year. We are reminded to enjoy the moment, reflect on the past and visualize a healthier, happier, more productive, and peaceful future.

Time to Reflect and Plan

Now is a traditional time for looking back, remembering the past, and looking forward, resolving to make a “better” future. In project management this is quality improvement through assessment, control, improvement planning, and follow through.

As individuals, we make resolutions to improve by giving up bad habits and cultivating positive behavior. We resolve to stop overeating or drinking and to exercise more, or to take that course that will lead to a new career, or to be kinder and more understanding and patient.

But many resolutions last a short time because we don’t follow through.

On a team or organizational level, do you make resolutions and follow through with them? Do you reflect and plan as a normal ongoing process, or is it a once-a-year event?

Quality Management

Among project management’s principles is assuring quality by critically assessing performance and planning to improve. Dr Deming’s PDCA cycle: Plan, Do, Check, and Act is one way of looking at the improvement process.

Reflect and resolve once a year and you are certain to miss a lot of opportunities to improve performance and wellness. Build PDCA into your normal way of doing whatever you do and you will reap the benefits of an ever-improvising process.

Learn

This article reinforces the message of my October article, “Learn from the Past to Perfect Performance, “Learn from experience. Set aside time for reflection, learning, and making the intention to perfect the way you live and work.”

Improvement is cyclical. It is ongoing. It continues as long as the target process or product lasts. The target process may be your own project management process or a new process resulting from a project. Here the focus is on the project management process.

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PDCA

The PDCA cycle is an improvement model that uses a scientific method:

Plan – propose a change,
Do – implement it,
Check – measure to see if the intended goals are achieved,
Act – decide whether to adjust by taking appropriate action in another cycle, or to standardize and stabilize the new process.

You decide to standardize and stabilize changes to your process when you have achieved planned benefits. Then you start a new cycle based on your new standard.

The Standard

You may or may not have a standard to start with.

When a new process is being designed and implemented the standard is a set of expectations. For example, you expect to complete 90% percent of projects within 10% of the original planned time and budget.

If you have done performance measurement you may know that your current standard is 40% of your projects meeting that expectation. If you do not have an objective sense of your past performance, you are at a disadvantage, but all is not lost. Chances are there is a subjective sense that you are not satisfying stakeholder expectations. Too many projects are delivered late and overbudget.

Part of planning is to set an expectation, a standard or benchmark to use as a target. You determine your goals and set the standard for measuring or checking the effects of your efforts. Research to determine if your goals are realistic. Make sure you are setting a realistic expectation about how long it will take to achieve your goals. Assess risks.

Plan to Achieve Goals

With realistic goals in mind, you plan the way you will meet them. To do that well, you have a decision to make. Will you refine your existing process or start from a blank slate?

How unstable and undefined is the current process? Is documenting it worth the effort or is it more effective to find a good model and adapt it to your current conditions.

In the realm of project management, don’t try to invent a brand-new process. You would be reinventing the wheel. Instead, take the time and effort to find a suitable model or models for the kind of projects you perform. If you have multiple project types you may need multiple defined processes, some agile, some more structured.

Cause Analysis

Look back to see why you are not meeting stakeholder expectations. Sep back and candidly assess causes. Are schedules and budgets dictated from above or are they the result of actual planning based on expected resources and conditions? Are projects initiated without regard of their impact on ongoing operations and other projects? Are estimators and/or performers in need of training or better tools or both?

Looking back at causes and on the state of the current process often causes conflict and resistance. Performers and project managers may be attached to the way they have been operating.

For example, they may be happy not to have to follow a defined process. They may not have knowledge of or may be in denial regarding the perceptions of stakeholders. They may be threatened by criticism and resistant to change.

Tread carefully to manage change in a way that engages and motivates the people who will have to go through the transition and live with the new process.

This is where follow through comes in. Educate, train, and implement change. Treat it as you would with any project, with care to support the people involved.

Check and Act

Realize that the new or changed process is not complete until you have checked to see if goals have been met. This is quality control and testing.

If you have done it well, the planning has left a standard, a benchmark, to measure against to determine if your efforts have achieved what you intended. Check often during the life of the improvement process.

Based on your findings decide and act. You may decide to continue, with or without changes to your goals, methods, or both. Or you may decide to stop, standardize, and stabilize the process.

Standardizing and stabilizing the process does not mean that your improvement work is done. You have just set a new standard against which to measure performance and go into a new PDCA cycle.

If you have done the improvement job well, future changes will be tweaks rather than major changes, though as new technologies like AI are introduced, more radical changes may be needed.

It is always a new year. Look back at what you have done, how successful it has been, and what you can do to make it better. Look forward to plan check and act.

Related articles:

Learn from the Past to Perfect Performance.

https://www.projecttimes.com/articles/learn-from-the-past-to-perfect-performance/#:~:text=To%20optimize%20performance%2C%20learn%20from,intentions%2C%20performance%2C%20and%20goals

The Key to Performance Improvement: Candid Performance Assessment

https://www.projecttimes.com/articles/the-key-to-performance-improvement-candid-perfromance-assessment/

Achieving Quality Performance and Results

https://www.projecttimes.com/articles/achieving-quality-performance-and-results/

Late and Over Budget Projects: No Simple Answers to Complex Questions

Written by George Pitagorsky on January 24, 2024. Posted in Articles.

Albert Einstein said, “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.” Some simple answers may be true, but most are not. Human systems and relationships are complex. When problems, issues, or questions arise, don’t be satisfied with simplistic answers that assume that there is a single cause that if eliminated will resolve the problem or answer the question.

That is not to say that there are no simple solutions. There are but applying them is not easy. They require adapting the solution to the situation at hand and overcoming obstacles to its application.

Examples

For Example, on a personal level, the answer to “How can we live a life of wellness?” is simple, accept things as they are, do what you can do, and let go of the things that get in the way. The same simple answer applies to the problem of chronically late and overbudget projects.

But, accepting and letting go into a solution is not so easy. Accept and let go is often the last thing we want to hear when we are trying to resolve the issue of late and overbudget projects.

We need to answer the question, “How do we break the misunderstandings, cultural conditions, and habits that keep us from accepting and letting go?” The answer depends on the nature of the people involved and the environment. You must get down to the specific causes of the problem, assess them, decide what to do, and do it.

When you do take action be realistic. Do not expect miracles (they might happen but let them be a surprise rather than an expectation). The more complex the situation the greater the probability of having to refine the action over time until an optimal solution is found.

Predictability – Complex vs complicated

Before moving on let’s be clear about what a complex situation is. The situation is the system, state of affairs, or circumstances within which the issue occurs. When the system consists of many interrelated parts and the parts act independently from one another the system becomes emergent – we don’t know how things will turn out until they turn out. In other words, complex systems are not predictable. Systems in which humans interact with one another in a changing environment are complex.

Complicated systems, on the other hand, also have many parts but their relationships to one another are clearly defined and coordinated. For example, a jet liner is a complicated system. Removing unnecessary elements, you can know what will happen when the pilot flies the plane. Complicated systems are predictable.

Systems can be understood by breaking the system down into their parts. This “decomposition” makes the number and type of intersecting elements – people, expectations, departments, technology, processes, rules, interactions, objectives, predictability, cultural norms, etc. As this is done the degree of predictability of the system becomes obvious.

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Late and overbudget projects occur in a system made up of several departments within client and provider organizations. Multiple projects are occurring simultaneously. Departments may have conflicting objectives. There may be insufficient coordination – for example an ineffective portfolio management process. Expectations may be unrealistic. Communication skills and emotional intelligence may be primitive. Hierarchical relationships may get in the way of effective communication, decision making, and planning.

In a complex system, aside from the probability of unpredictability, it is not possible to accurately predict the outcome of a simple solution like the implementation of a new and wonderful project and portfolio management tool set and simplistic training in scheduling and budgeting. Without going further into the causes, we can predict that the solution will not solve the problem – projects will continue to be late and overbudget.

Why do we seek simple?

If we can predict that simple solutions to complex problems will fail, why then apply simple solutions?

One reason we do it is because we want certainty. Simple solutions often come with the promise of a quick and definitive fix at low cost. Often, we do not want to or can’t spend the time and effort to understand complexities and determine root causes. Even when we do spend the time and effort, we might find that the causes are too embarrassing to bring to the surface, or we might think they are not actionable. For example, the cause of the problem of late and over budget projects might be a combination of sales efforts that set expectations that cannot be met, poor estimating and scheduling, senior management or clients who won’t listen to reason.

It reminds me of a story:

A man, Nasruddin, is crawling around under the streetlamp in front of his house. His neighbor comes over to help. The man is searching for his dropped key. After combing the area under the light, the neighbor asks, “Are you sure you dropped it here?” Nasruddin says, “Oh, I dropped it over there by the door. But it’s dark over there, we’d never find it there.”

So, someone comes up with the idea that a new project management tool and some scheduling and estimating training for the project managers will solve the problem. That makes everyone, except, maybe, the Project Managers, happy. The salespeople are off the hook. Senior management can keep on doing what they are doing, and they are happy that they won’t have to deal with the complexities of making meaningful change.

The Bottomline

The simple solution is to accept the situation as it is – look at it objectively, accepting all its flaws, and with a realistic understanding of it, and then figure out what to do to eliminate the obstacles to resolving the problem. With obstacles, like fear of making meaningful change by confronting powerful stakeholders, out of the way, a workable, yet probably imperfect, solution can be found. When the solution includes ongoing assessment and refinement, it is as perfect as it can be.

The challenge is to courageously speak truth to authority, to accept the way things are, and let go into an ongoing performance improvement process to get them to where you want them to be.