On Adapting
There is an old Andy Kaufman skit where he purposefully tells bad jokes, bombing one after another to the point where the audience is heckling him and he starts to whimper and cry. As he cries, eventually his voice takes on a kind of rhythm. He moves over to some bongos placed to the side and begins to play to the rhythm of his weeping. The audience claps in support of Kaufman’s impromptu “song” as he joyously dances off the stage.
The genius of this skit is how Kaufman blurred the lines between performance art, comedy and group participation. Rather than simply performing a set skit with intended results, he made the audience reaction a symbiotic part of his act. In other words, the success of the “performance” relies on the negative feedback to his “mistakes.” His adaptability is what makes the routine successful, rather than adhering tightly to an original script.
This comes to mind because it’s a good way to describe project management. Leaders of project teams establish timelines, create elaborative gantt charts, assign roles & goals, set milestones and insist upon timely deliverables. Still, things go wrong and these setbacks must be managed. What if we don’t get client feedback by a certain date? What is someone calls in sick? What if the schedule slips? And so it goes.
Successful digital team leaders are defined by how they manage slippage. They account for reality, for entropy, for unexpected delays, for cars that break down and kids that get sent home from daycare with 100-degree fevers. Successful leaders insist on scalability because they know the scope will change; they don’t remain steadfast to a rigid schedule that endorses constraint over opportunity. And they recognize that communication is not only a matter of who, when, and why, but also how many.
Last week I gave a talk at Rutgers University on the current status of Web accessibility and digital inclusive design, where I made the somewhat controversial statement that “there are no standards.” My point was not literally that standards do not exist (I am well aware of WCAG 2.0, WAI-ARIA and W3C markup validation), because these guidelines are obviously critical in crafting accessible online content. It’s when new digital interactions move beyond the Web and embrace emerging platforms that we must adapt “the rules” to new contexts. Otherwise, innovation slows to a crawl or (even worse) moves forward without accessibility in mind.
Guidelines are just that — a roadmap for how to move an execution from the concept stage to deliverable output. The real work is in adapting a standard process methodology for the common good, especially with multiple stakeholders all defining key performance indicators from their uniquely individual perspectives. Strict process control becomes necessary only when common sense and team harmony are at risk of evaporating.
Successful project leaders recognize this variability and ensure that nimble work streams remain fluid. Think of it as an anchored buoy that allows ships to navigate unknown waters, retaining visibility no matter how choppy the current gets. Technical specifications, while written in granite, still require execution that relies on that organic and fluctuating criteria known as Human Nature.
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