Spaghetti prefers the flirtatious dance of the fork. When you eat spaghetti you use a fork and twirl it against the side of your plate. It is acceptable to use a spoon. On occasion, lacking a spoon, I’ve survived dinners using a piece of bread. But using a knife to cut spaghetti? If the spaghetti is too long for you to eat comfortable, then take penne instead, or cornetti, or any of the other 350 types of pasta. No matter how good you are with a fork and knife, cutting spaghetti is just wrong.
When you’re doing something wrong, doing it well doesn’t make it right. “The righter we do the wrong thing, the wronger we become. It is better to do the right thing wrong than to do the wrong thing right. [….] Put another way: it is better to aim at and miss the right thing than aim at and hit the wrong thing.” (Russel Ackoff in Re-Creating the Corporation, 1999, p10).
We may not intentionally do the wrong thing. Frequently, we get so wrapped up in what we’re doing that we overlook the why, the reason behind the activity. Projects might grow so large and we forget why we’re doing them, or we focus too much on what we do that we loose track of the value we bring. Guy Kawasaki in “The Art of the Start 2.0” (2004) uses the example of ice harvesting to illustrate how we tend to identify with what we do, and not with the value we provide, and therefore fail to follow technological advancements or to “Jump Curves”.
Guy noticed that ice-harvesters didn’t enter the ice factory business, and ice factory owners didn’t transition to the refrigerator industry, causing their eventual downfall. We should identify with the value we provide rather than our specific tasks. For example, the purpose of the initial ice harvesters wasn’t ice harvesting; it was to offer cooling to households. This purpose persisted, and carries on with refrigerator manufacturers today.
“Yes, but…” you may say, “these were ancient times. Ice-age stuff which we’ve outgrown with our modern age and our fifth Industrial Revolution.” I’m not so sure. I still encounter planning solely for the sake of having something to track, rather than effectively managing risks and dependencies. De-scoping being done by reducing the number of Jira tickets, rather than refining the project’s ambition (which may naturally result in fewer tickets). We tend to, instead of navigating uncertainty, focus on enforcing predictability. Such an approach hinders adaptability and disregards the perpetual state of change in which projects navigate.
The only successful approach I’ve found is to maintain a clear perspective on value and purpose, with ‘purpose’ being something more than merely achieving correct and complete implementation of requirements. By keeping an eye on the broader context and the project’s fundamental objectives, planning and scoping transform into tools for managing uncertainty. Unpredictability and change become the comfortable norm, spaghetti is eaten with a fork, and curves morph into springboards to jump forward from.
