Why project managers need both, a broad vision, and a focused energy for details
Eminent physicist and mathematician Freeman Dyson styled it this way: we need both focused frogs and visionary birds. “Birds fly high in the air and survey broad vistas of mathematics out to the far horizons,” Dyson wrote in 2009. “They delight in concepts that unify our thinking and bring together diverse problems from different parts of the landscape. Frogs live in the mud below and see only the flowers that grow nearby. They delight in the details of particular objects, and they solve problems one at a time.” As a mathematician, Dyson labeled himself a frog, “But contended, “It is stupid to claim that birds are better than frogs because they can see farther, or that frogs are better then birds because they see deeper.” The world, he wrote, is both broad and deep. “We need birds and frogs working together to explore it.”
Source: Range, by David Epstein, pp.200-201
A project leader needs to be a visionary bird and a focused frog.
Vision: The Sky
A project manager needs to have a broad vision for their project.
Dyson, in the quote above, used the analogy of a bird. Let’s use another. Reading a map.
I know in our technological age, with map apps, we probably rarely pull out a paper map anymore.
But imagine, pulling out the paper map of your city. Laying it out flat on your dining room table. Standing up and following the roads as they lead thru, into and out of the city.
You find key landmarks.
You find the parks.
The monuments.
The key buildings and businesses.
You lean over the map, and trace your finger to find how roads connect. You may even find short cuts you never saw or even thought about it.
But you study the map from above. It gives your a totally different perspective than when you are actually driving the streets.
You see the big picture. You see how things connect.
You MUST do the same with your project.
Imagine your project plan like that map.
Lay it out.
Stand over it.
Look at every corner.
Every connection.
Think about what might be missing.
Soak in the vision of what your project can be and what it can accomplish.
How to have vision
You need to talk to people impacted by the project. Call them stakeholders, project customers, or just customers, you need to be talking to them.
By talking to them you will learn a few things:
-
You will learn what they are really sick of
-
You will learn what they really want
By listening to what they are really sick of, you will find their pain points.
And where you find pain points you find opportunity.
Opportunity for change and innovation.
Sometimes stakeholders are not able to communicate what they really want. It takes time. It may take several conversations. But along the way, it will come out.
And when you have an opportunity for innovation AND you know what users want, THEN you can begin to build vision.
The Why
Why have vision?
Your project, no matter WHAT it is, is going to introduce change.
Building a new bridge? Change.
Building a new software product so people can do X easier? Change.
Upgrading your current financial systems? Change.
Implementing a new social service program to serve your neighborhood? Change.
This also means that PEOPLE will have to go thru change.
And for people to ACCEPT that they will need to go thru change, they need vision.
It is that simple.
Communicate Vision
Once you HAVE the vision, you can communicate the vision.
There will be a day. Okay. DAYS. Where your stakeholders and your project team will be discouraged.
You will need to give them the VISION again and again.
Details: The Mud
A project manager needs to develop a focused energy for details.
A lot of project managers are managing projects for which they know nothing about the details. They are truly and simply, project managers. And in many ways, they become a bureaucrat. Simply an administrator.
But you need to be a focused frog. You need to go deeper on certain elements of your project.
On one project, we had to deal with the cost of credit card transactions. I did not know much about the nitty gritty details of these transactions, so I jumped in the mud.
I started to become the expert on these transactions.
I learned the credit card industry lingo.
I created charts and graphs to explain the concept.
I had my team create reports to demonstrate how well (or not well) we were doing with transaction fees.
You simply cannot know the details about every single element of your project. It is why you have a team!
But you need to dig deep, yourself, on an issue or two. It will help you begin to breathe with the project.
And it will help you move from being a mere project bureaucrat to a project leader.
Why Both?
Why be both a visionary bird and a focused frog?
Projects demand it.
Projects NEED you to be both.
They actually feed one another. The greater the vision, the better for you to spot the one or two areas where you can dig it deeper.
The deeper you go on these few topics, the greater your vision for the whole will become.
Be Both
Can you even be both?
Yes. This is what Anh Dao Pham calls synthesis thinking. Anh, in her book “Glue”, shares a quote from a colleague who is speaking about her ability to synthesize.
You have a desire to understand. Instead of just running each project like you’re following a pattern or formula, you try to understand the situation, the problem(s) to be solved, the true goals/mission/purpose, the people and their individual (and often conflicting) goals…the discovery happens as you’re executing, and every bit that you learn along the way then shapes how you approach the execution. And what ends up happening is that your curiosity leads you to becoming the most knowledgable person on the team - you’ve learned the strategy side, the business side, the tech side, the creative side, and the analytics, and you’ve become the epicenter of everything that is happening with the project. This is a hard (maybe impossible) trait to teach and transfer to some else, because just being curious is not sufficient. You also have to have a bran that can assimilate all that information and then connect all the dots.
Source: Glue, by Anh Dao Pham, p.74
Connect. All. The. Dots.
You can only do that if you can hold both the vision and the details in your hand.
So take out your map and begin connecting the dots.