The Danger of "Chaos Mode"

A friend recently posted on Facebook that he was having a hard time with procrastination, and wanted to know who else struggled to get things done in a timely fashion rather than right up to the deadline. If this was asked in a live meeting I would sheepishly raise my hand. Add to this stimuli a new audiobook I've been listening to from Audible.com called Motivational Legends: Training Development and Character for Personal Success, and I've started to look at how I behave with a fresh set of eyes.

My readers know I claim to be a Project Management and Leadership expert, and that for the majority of my career since the military my work has been largely in project recovery. So much so, that I have a marketing company advising I call myself "America's Project Recovery Expert." In fact, when I get asked about what I do in Project Management I often respond with:

"Well, I've never started a project, and I've rarely finished one. I'm the guy you call when the project was set on fire and pushed off a cliff, but you still need to finish it." 

Rarely finish because too often, after I start making solid progress on a project, I'm called upon to hand-off the old disaster now under a semblance of control in order to deal with a new fireball somewhere else. Even before my civilian career I was often the disaster recovery guy in the military, handed the tough assignments which needed to be fixed RIGHT NOW, from communications blackouts to actual firefights. One of my more popular programs Parachute Project Management is based on these experiences and how to deal with them.

Leadership Quote of the Week - Dwight Eisenhower

In Preparing For Battle I Have Always Found That Plans Are Useless, But Planning Is Indispensable

- Dwight Eisenhower

Since we are discussing the Eisenhower Decision Matrix, it's appropriate to share one of his most famous quotes. The irony here is that in the blog post earlier I am telling you that you need to spend more time in Quadrant 2 (Planning), yet now I am posting a quote that says the plan is useless, what gives? 

Well what gives is that the action of planning is where the real pay-dirt is. To paraphrase another military general (Field Marshal Helmuth Karl Bernhard Graf von Moltke): "No Plan Survives First Contact." This statement is true, because no matter how well planned, situations change and things will not always go according to plan. As such, a leader needs to understand that plans cannot be final. While planning, (s)he should consider contingencies and "what if" scenarios during planning. Having these contingencies ready when the plan changes will make the team successful, and why planning is indispensable. 

When working in project management we call it Risk Mitigation. A significant portion of planning is the detailing of Risk into a matrix which shows the impacts of an event happening, and then details out how the risks will be addressed if the event occurs. I may share the techniques in a future blog post, as it's important to know how to do this during planning of complex projects which could have serious and (sometimes) dramatic consequences if something goes wrong. 

As a note, what you are seeing here is a picture I took from the back of a M113 in Kuwait as soldiers of the 4th Infantry Division are about to be briefed on the plan to cross into Iraq and convoy to Baqu'bah in 2003. 

Where Do You Spend Your Time?

The one thing in the universe we cannot buy back is time. We are here for a limited time and then we are gone, which means we should try to make the absolute most of our time. But our time is under a constant barrage of constraints, requirements and requests; to the point where we often feel overwhelmed and not sure where our time went.

Dwight Eisenhower wasn't only the 34th President of the United States. During World War II he was the Supreme Allied Commander, responsible for the actions of the United States, British, French, and (arguably) the Russian military organizations. Can you imagine the amount of requests on his time? Military strategies, political maneuvers, and anything that he wanted to do. General Eisenhower had to build a model in order to determine how to address the requests on his time. What he developed was the Eisenhower Decision Matrix, which has found its way into the management lexicon. In fact, Steven Covey included it in one of the most popular self-help books of all time Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. 

As I built my C4 concept, I realized that an understanding of the Decision Matrix is critical for Conceive, mostly because Leaders don't know where they are spending their time and need to be aware of where they get the most bang for their buck. In fact, this is more of a preamble to Conceive, as Conceive is largely a Quadrant 2 activities (but I get ahead of myself). As I researched the Eisenhower Decision Matrix, I tried to find a graphical representation which would properly illustrate the concept, but what I found was a lot of quadrant diagrams with a lot of words, require too much explanation. So instead, I worked with my graphic designer (who happens to be my wife, so lucky!) to build a graphical representation of the Decision Matrix that should allow understanding without a lot of explanation (but I probably will over-explain the images during this blog). I now present the C4 Leader version of the Eisenhower Decision Matrix: