LOGICal eMOTIONs

Stop Setting Up For Failure.

// October 27th, 2007 // Brain Dump, Logical Emotions

We’ve all done it, and at some point again in the future, we’ll do it again. Not quite the rosy outlook we were looking for on a Saturday morning, however, through understanding we can lessen the effects in the future, right?

About a month and a half ago I was asked by a friend to help them out with a particular talk they were going to be making. They had made this presentation once before and I had supplied the visual aids in the form of a PowerPoint presentation. No, not hideous slides of text and garbage, just slides and complimentary images that faded in an out as the talk went along.

This time around I was asked well in advance of the talk if I could provide the same PP to which I agreed – but with conditions. Knowing that these things usually have me working like crazy at the last minute, I set out a schedule of when I would like to have their final script, some time for me to work on the presentation, a date to get together for a final review, and some time to make any changes if needed before the actual presentation.

So, deadlines for script come and go, meeting gets pushed off, pushed off, and pushed off again.. Final script arrives on a Thursday (talk is on the Saturday), and some extra images to use come filtering in on Friday.

Did the presentation get finished in time? No.
Was the friend disappointed? Yes.
Was I disappointed? Yes.
Did I try to keep this from happening? Yes.
Did I keep it from happening? No.

When I agreed to do the visuals, but with conditions, really, it was a sign that I am improving. It was actually about looking ahead, realizing that I need more time to do things my way and that setting up a schedule would give some flexibility as challenges came up. Considering that this was a volunteer project, it had to be fit in among the spare time slots and not during client hours. With big spans between deadlines it provided me more flexibility to work on it and didn’t cram it into a last minute time slot.

Where everything pretty much went off the rails is when the length of the talk was shortened, and the final script missed it’s deadline. The final review meeting was changed to a script review and pushed off until two days before the presentation. Then followed the receiving of the final script, followed by additional images…

Unfortunately I had forgotten about the complexity that I had originally built into the old presentation and wasn’t realized until I began work on it. Wrestling with the idea of beginning with a new presentation, or modify the old presentation was taking time and the clock was ticking.

The sad thing was that time, simply ran out. To fix the old presentation would have required more time than was available, and to start from scratch would have taken about the same amount of time also. Sure, I could have whipped up a couple slides with a picture on them, but like I told my friend, “It would look like sh*t.”.

It was time to make a call…

No, not one of those friendly calls simply to “touch base” – no, the “I can’t finish your presentation in time, and depending on how you view that it will either ruin your presentation, or not, and ruin our friendship, or not”..

The question really is: Is it fair to depend on someone and tarnish their integrity when the rules of the game change out of their favor?

When we stop and look at this particular situation, really, there is quite a bit to it. I let someone down who was depending on me. Yet, I should have called it off when deadlines were being missed. I didn’t though. My integrity comes into question, yet I let it by setting myself up and not heeding the warning signs. There were external influences that changed the playing field, and there were personal standards at play still when the rules of the game changed.

Really, to continue down the path (and it was), could the outcome have actually been different? When time required is greater than time allowed, things don’t really end well, do they? The time allowed had been shortened dramatically, and the time required wasn’t truly realized until late in the game, and ultimately, too late to make necessary corrections. It became a no-win situation.

So what do we do in the future?

We stop setting ourselves up for failure by ignoring the critical warning points along the way. An early warning point can be the nature of the request, it could be missed deadlines or milestones, it could even be the person making the request. In this case deadlines were established for very specific reasons, yet when they came and went, everything continued on when in fact it should have been stopped and re-evaluated. Also in this particular case, the nature of the request was in fact an early warning point, however, it was easily dealt with by establishing deadlines. The tricky bit is that if the deadlines are ignored, it is as if they never existed and you default back to the previous warning point…

Identify the warning points – if you can manage them, great, if you can’t, HEED THE WARNINGS!

Photo by 4737 carlin

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