Peripheral vision

Many years ago I worked in a large consulting firm and a story that struck me was about a client cheerfully informing a bid team at a sales presentation that he already had a different bid for the same contract from a different team in the same firm. Yeah, he invited them in just to tell them that and “ta-tah”.

If you heard that this happened to someone who a friend of yours knows then either they worked at the same firm as me, or, I think, it may be a modern myth. But I have a suspicion this could have and probably has happened in different ways again and again.

I came across something similar years later where it was only a travelling colleague, who, visiting a different office, spotted that a team there was doing the same work as a team back at his base. How can we stop (or at least improve on) this kind of thing, if you accept it is “a thing”?

The examples don’t need to be as extreme as this to make a case for situational awareness of what’s going on. We just need to make people aware. We don’t need to predict or own their reactions, nor whether any of this connects or not. I think we may never actually know.

So we observe in KM that there’s an almighty rush and serious effort to pool and share knowledge, to collaborate, when there’s an urgent and important need to do so, like a bid. Heroic efforts are made. We equally observe very little interest in doing a few things to be prepared for that sudden need. One is all-consuming, the other is barely noticeable.

It’s clear, isn’t it, that people are very interested in stuff when they need it, less so in the normal run of things when it might be sensible to do a few things in readiness – except that that’s too boring. So what can we do?

I’m proposing that we do things to give people a shallow, peripheral vision awareness of lots of things. Broad and shallow rather than deep and narrow, in this case. Announce all the projects that start, all the milestones reached, all the projects that complete. Give people something to latch on to that they could follow up if and when they ever need to – a project name and some key facts about what it’s all about. The key person, the subject, the location, one thing that’s interesting about it. Most of it will go in one ear and out the other – but so do your long and detailed project presentations unless they connect with something that people care about right now. And if they do care they’ll follow up anyway. Because, someday in the near or far future, something will come up, and their mind will remember, wasn’t there a project ‘X’ we did about something like that? Wasn’t ‘Y’ the PM? And they have somewhere to start.

* Daring to commit warballs I’m writing in the, well, I think, early days of the war in Europe over Ukraine – but I don’t know, do I, if these are the early days or the final days (but I have a grim hunch). Everyone is so wise now about so many things – oligarchs, NATO expansion, Syria. They were just too boring at the time. It’s human nature. I far prefer act early to panic late. Go see your doctor about that thing that “may be nothing” – because it might be something, and is more likely to “become something” if you don’t. I know it’s boring to act when it isn’t urgent. Just pretend it is.