Manage This - The Project Management Podcast

The podcast by project managers for project managers. Mastering written communication and focusing on the hidden science behind how our reading and writing influences our thoughts and actions. Hear some best practices when it comes to writing winning bids, pitfalls we should avoid, as well as common workplace communication errors. Table of Contents 02:02 … Rob’s Background Story03:17 … Misfired Messages07:23 … Knowing When to Call a Time-out10:53 … Recognizing the Warning Signs12:56 … Effective Writing in Project Management15:45 … Fluency Heuristic17:01 … Overloading the Decision-Maker22:46 … An Attention-Grabbing Introduction26:57 … “Garden-Pathing”27:49 … Email Salutations29:18 … Compelling Subject Lines30:54 … Words of Advice34:01 … Contact Rob35:01 … Closing ROB ASHTON:  ...write as if you are writing for a human because you are.  You know, not for the position.  You don’t look at someone’s job title.  Think of them as a human being.  They are as human as you are, and they’re subject to the same mental shortcuts and the same irritations and the same cognitive biases. WENDY GROUNDS:  Welcome to Manage This, the podcast by project managers for project managers.  We are so glad you’re joining us.  If you like what you hear, please visit us at Velociteach.com, where you can leave a comment on our Manage This Podcast page.  I’m Wendy Grounds, and joining me is Bill Yates.  Today we’re very excited about our guest.  We’ve never really talked about written communication.  Rob Ashton has a very interesting background.  He’s actually been in science and research.  And because of that he got into the process of reading and writing because of writing scientific reports and research papers.  But he has a very unique perspective on why so much of our written communication just doesn’t work. BILL YATES:  That’s true.  Now we’re in a remote workforce more so than ever.  So many of us are working virtually.  So what do you do?  You pop open Slack.  You pop open Skype.  And you pop open Teams.  And you just instant message with your team back and forth, back and forth.  Which many times that’s totally appropriate.  I think as Rob will get into, we have a number of different tools at our disposal.  You’ve got to pick the right tool for the right message, or you’re going to get into trouble. WENDY GROUNDS:  Right, right.  I’m excited to talk to Rob.  A little bit about him before we get there is he’s the founder of a global learning company called Emphasis, which specializes in written communication.  Some of his high-profile clients have been Big 4 accounting firms, big tech, big pharma.  He’s also done some work with the U.K. Prime Minister’s office at 10 Downing Street, and even the royal household at Buckingham Palace.  So we’re in good company. BILL YATES:  Yes.  WENDY GROUNDS:  Hi, Rob.  Welcome to Manage This.  Thank you so much for joining us today. ROB ASHTON:  Hey, it’s great to be here.  Thanks for inviting me. Rob’s Background Story WENDY GROUNDS:  Rob, before we get into our conversation on written communication, can you tell us how you got into this field and what your background is? ROB ASHTON:  I started off as a research scientist before a love of words led me into publishing.  So originally trained as an editor.  And I did that for a while, and I found that I guess I just got a little tired of applying the same techniques again and again to the words I was trying to knock into shape.  And I decided that instead of doing that, I would go and teach people to do it.  So I set up a training company to do that, and that was called Emphasis.  And that was 23 years ago. And then six years ago I decided that I would go back to my roots, and I would start to look at the science of this because there’s very little out there on the science of written communication, or at least in the business world.  There’s a ton of stuff out there in the academic world, but virtually none of it makes its way into the business world.  And I wanted to see why.  First of all I wanted to see if I was right.  It seemed to work in practice, but I didn’t know why, and maybe there’s better ways to do it.  In fact, I thought that would take a few months.  I gave myself six months, and I thought I’d write a book on it.  And of course that was incredibly naive.  And here I am six years later, finally working on the book.  So it’s been a six-year odyssey to look into the science of written communication. Misfired Messages WENDY GROUNDS:  We are very excited about this topic.  We’ve had many podcasts on communication, leadership, those types of things.  But never before have we spoken on communication and the written word.  And I think it’s definitely a very relevant topic to discuss. BILL YATES:  I think everybody’s going to have to read the transcript closely. WENDY GROUNDS:  Yes.  We will have it all written down there for you folk.  You know, we’ve all had that scenario when you’re having an innocent chat with someone on messaging.  You get that text that comes in.  And you take it the wrong way.  Or it’s what you call misfired messages are going back and forth all of a sudden, and you don’t really get clarity as to what’s going on, and we end up getting in hot water.  Rob, what happens there?  Why do we so often misinterpret these messages that we’re receiving? ROB ASHTON:  Great question.  It’s something that happens an awful lot.  It’s funny, what you’re talking about there is written communication.  And yet we don’t think of it as written communication.  We’re thinking of it as talking.  You know, we’re chatting.  And in fact you even see it on customer help desks.  It’s called “live chat.”  It’s chat, talking; and yet it’s not talking, it’s writing.  And I think right at the heart of that problem is something that most people don’t realize, and that’s that we didn’t evolve to read and write. Now, when I say that, I’ve actually taken a lot of flak on social media for this recently by saying that.  People say, what are you talking about?  It doesn’t matter.  We didn’t evolve to drive motor cars, you know.  Why does that even matter?  Or they’ll say, yes, we did.  We’ve been reading and writing for a long time.  And we’ve evolved to do it.  Some people even think we’ve evolved to do it since we started using the web to communicate.  But the fact is that as a species, we’ve been reading and writing for about 5,000 years, which sounds like a very long time; right?  But it’s not.  It’s only a heartbeat in evolutionary terms.  When you are reading and writing, you are using circuitry that you have developed since you were born.  This is why takes us so long to learn to read and write.  We can understand our parents’ voices, or at least we can react to our parents’ voices, and we can make our presence felt to our parents by crying when we’re babies.  You know, we use our voices to communicate.  We use our hearing to communicate straight out of the womb.  But when it comes to reading and writing, this is something we have to learn to do, it takes years, and we are rewiring the brain.  And what we’re doing is we’re joining up parts of the brain that we evolved for other purposes, such as for hearing, for example. If you’ve ever thought about reading, reading is a miracle, really, because you see dots and squiggles on a screen or on a page, and you hear voices in your head.  You know, that’s just miraculous, I think.  So it’s very easy to take that for granted and to think that it’s just something we can just do, and we do it naturally, and we do it easily.  But it’s really, it’s like the ultimate brain hack, reading and writing.  We are operating, though we may not realize it, on the edge of our cognitive abilities when we’re doing that. So to your question, it doesn’t leave much room for things like emotional control.  I think this emotional control thing is one of the keys for why we so often end up in hot water when we’re communicating in that way, when we’re messaging.  It’s why we so often misinterpret things, although there are other things we can dig into there.  But, you know, if you are irritated already, then we often check these things in situations that we would never have been reading in before.  Normally, reading was something we did, you know, you go back a long time, you go back even a couple of decades, you would be reading a book; you would be reading a magazine.  You wouldn’t be doing it while you sat in a traffic jam getting really wound up about traffic. But when we are already irritated, and a message lands, we look.  That just confirms that we’re right to be irritated, and we start to think that it’s that message that has irritated us, that has made us angry.  So there are all sorts of reasons.  But I think the key to it all is that we didn’t evolve to read and write. Knowing When to Call a Time-out BILL YATES:  One of the things that really cracked me up was reading through one of the blog posts that you had about a very innocent question that you asked a teammate that was on a project.  You simply asked for a project status.  Talk us through that interaction. ROB ASHTON:  But you know, I still remember it like it was yesterday because it had such a profound effect on me.  I sat there in my office.  We were just looking at the screen full of Gantt charts and Trello boards.  And we’d had a standup, one of our regular weekly project meetings on the Monday.  And I think it was Wednesday by this point.  It was the middle of the week.  And that the standup everybody had said, “Yeah, everything’s going fine.”  They’d been really positive about what they were working on.  But as I was looking at those things, I just thought just something doesn’t feel right. So I just turned to Slack.  And I said to my colleague, “Can you just give me an update?”  You know, just how’s it going?  How is that project going?  And, now,

The podcast by project managers for project managers. The number of projects initiated in all sectors has skyrocketed, yet why do project failure rates still remain alarmingly high? Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez, author of the Harvard Business Review Project Management Handbook: How to Launch, Lead, and Sponsor Successful Projects, emphasizes the value of senior leaders investing in the pursuit of better project management. Table of Contents 02:11 … The World Champion in Project Management03:53 … The Project Economy05:46 … Organizational Ambidexterity10:15 … Low Success Rate of Projects13:31 … Choosing Predictive or Adaptive Agile Methods16:05 … Introducing The Project Canvas18:44 … Three Dimensions of the Project Canvas20:07 … 1.Foundation21:05 … 2.People22:02 … 3.Creation23:20 … Senior Executives and Project Success26:15 … Challenge your Sponsors27:57 … Self-Assessment29:15 … Engagement Triple Constraint33:30 … Advice for Younger Project Managers35:32 … Contact Antonio37:33 … Closing ANTONIO NIETO-RODRIGUEZ:  Senior leaders are not there yet.  They’ve never invested in the importance of project management, building competencies.  Part of what we started here is that they did not appreciate it as a core topic.  They preferred to talk about strategy, innovation, and other things, and rather than project management implementation. WENDY GROUNDS:  Welcome to Manage This, the podcast by project managers for project managers.  I’m Wendy Grounds, and joining me is Bill Yates.  Just a quick thanks to our listeners who reach out to us and leave comments on our website or on social media.  We always love hearing from you.  We know you’re also looking for opportunities to acquire PDUs, your Professional Development Units, towards recertifications.  And you can still claim PDUs for all our podcast episodes.  Listen up at the end of the show for information on how you can claim those PDUs. Our guest today is Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez.  He is an author, practitioner, and consultant who teaches strategy and project implementation to senior leaders.  His research has been recognized by Thinkers50, with its prestigious Ideas into Practice award, and he is featured in the 2020 Global Gurus Top 30 List of Management Professionals.  Antonio has served as chairman of the Global Project Management Institute, and in that role he launched the Brightline initiative.  He is also the founder of Projects & Co, cofounder of the Strategy Implementation Institute, and a member of the Marshall Goldsmith 100 Coaches group. BILL YATES:  Antonio has written several books, as well.  The one that we’re going to focus on today is the new “Harvard Business Review Project Management Handbook.”  You may hear Antonio or us refer to this as the HBR, the Harvard Business Review, in our comments.  And Antonio is joining us from Brussels. WENDY GROUNDS:  Antonio, welcome to Manage This.  We’ve looked forward to our conversation with you today, and so we’re so grateful to you for being with us. ANTONIO NIETO-RODRIGUEZ:  Thanks to you, Wendy.  I’m really happy to be here with you and look forward to this conversation. The World Champion in Project Management WENDY GROUNDS:  Yeah.  Before we get started, I do have a quick question for you.  If you look back, when was the moment when you knew project management was your thing?  How did you get into project management?  And you’ve just done so much in the field of project management.  I think I saw in LinkedIn you’re the world champion in project management, and I love that.  So how did you become that? ANTONIO NIETO-RODRIGUEZ:  Well, it’s a pretty sad story, Wendy.  I recognized that I wanted to work and specialize in project management when I was fired.  I was fired in the sense that I had this big idea in a big consulting firm where I wanted to become partner, and I said, “Let’s develop project management advisory service because everybody’s struggling with projects.”  This is like 20 years.  And they said, “Well, yeah, we like the idea, but it’s not something we can make money out of, project management; right?  It’s very tactical.  It’s kind of boring.  So that kind of – and you’re fired, Antonio, because that’s a bad idea.”  And it was like a game changer for me, was painful for a few weeks.  And then I say, how come senior leaders don’t understand the value of project management?  Why do we have these bad names, that name of boring, old and complicated, bureaucratic.  So that was the start of a love story. WENDY GROUNDS:  Wow, very cool.  BILL YATES:  Yeah.  Great idea.  Just you’re out of the company now, go figure it out yourself. WENDY GROUNDS:  Well, I’m glad it turned out that way because we can gain so much knowledge from you.  And I think you’ve gone on to do better things. ANTONIO NIETO-RODRIGUEZ:   Thank you, Wendy.  I feel like that, too.  So if you ever get fired, take it as something good. BILL YATES:  That’s right. ANTONIO NIETO-RODRIGUEZ:  That’s mine. The Project Economy BILL YATES:  That’s right, I have my eyes wide open, thinking, okay, what opportunity is coming?  Antonio, one of the questions we wanted to ask you about, it’s related to the project economy.  You speak about the project economy.  We’ve had projects in the economy since the Industrial Revolution.  What’s changed? ANTONIO NIETO-RODRIGUEZ:  Well, Bill, good question to start.  I always like to talk at the big picture first, and then deep dive.  I think it helps people to follow on the conversation.  So there are two dimensions of the project economy.  One is the macro level, is what happens around the world, what happens in countries with governments, public spending.  And what I say is that with the pandemic the world will see more projects in the next decade with all these public investments to regenerate economies and infrastructures and healthcare, than we’ve ever seen.  So the amount of project that we’re going to see from a macro level, we’ve never seen before.  This is millions of projects, millions of project managers, billions of investment, or trillions of investment.  So that’s one side. And I compare figures.  I look at the Marshall Plan, I look at the numbers from the financial crisis in 2008, and this is like 10 times more.  So that’s exciting.  I think that’s great for the profession.  But the bigger challenge or change or disruption is what happens within companies.  This is like what I call the more micro level, where the type of work is moving from operations to project based.  And that’s what is a very radical change because in the past, Bill, companies would have projects that are nice to have.  They would have a few people, a few people just working as project managers, 5% maybe.  What changes now is that most of the employees will work project-based.  So that’s a radical shift, radical disruption I’m talking about. Organizational Ambidexterity BILL YATES:  There’s a phrase that you used in the book I thought was quite clever, wish I’d come up with it myself.  It was “organizational ambidexterity.”  And in that you talk about this balance that companies are looking for between running the organization and changing the organization.  Talk a bit further about that. ANTONIO NIETO-RODRIGUEZ:  Sure, Bill.  This is a concept which I deep-dived in the past in curiosity about this organizational ambidexterity.  And there’s been quite a lot of academic research, more in the field of strategy implementation.  And then there has been good papers around these exploitation versus exploration.  So a company needs to have these big main areas which is exploiting your current business, your current assets, your operations.  And then on top of that, think about the future, your future, the exploration field, what I call change in projects. And over the last 50 years what happens is that the primary area of focus of processes, people, competencies, leadership, senior management attention and time has been on that operation, on exploitation.  We’ve become so efficient that we don’t need so many people there anymore; right?  It’s done by machines.  And what happened is that the exploitation part that changed the project has exploded this, where most of the things happening in the life cycle of our projects have gone from maybe five years to one year.  If you look at some statistics, for example, Booz Allen Hamilton was talking about how many of the revenues of companies come from new products.  And in the past, in 1980s, was about 20%.  So 20% of the revenues would come from new products, new projects.  Over the past 40 years that’s about 50% of the revenues comes from new projects or new products. So that means that everything is accelerating; right?  And the exploitation versus exploration, the business as usual versus the change has shifted.  And I’m going to be long here, but it’s important.  The key is not eliminating your exploitation; right.  You cannot remove your operations.  And that’s a big challenge because it’s finding the right balance of how much do we do in the operational part, we need to keep that.  But how much do we shift in terms of changing, agility, different culture, different type of organizational structures.  And that’s where I think many companies struggle. BILL YATES:  That’s good.  And Antonio, it’s interesting to me at a grassroots, at a tactical level.  Those people, the resources that are working on those projects, for some that are doing the ongoing operations, okay, here’s an existing, let’s call this a – this product is our cash cow.  This brings in great revenue for a company, and it’s evolved through the years.  But it’s kind of boring from my standpoint as a contributor.  Now here’s this fun new project that the company’s doing.  I really want to be on that team.

The podcast by project managers for project managers. How does the established project management approach fall short when managing complexity in projects? Kieran Duck wrote the book The Complex Project Toolkit that describes the use of design thinking to deliver your most challenging projects. Table of Contents 02:35 … The Complex Project Toolkit Book03:52 … Standard Project Management vs. Managing Complex Projects06:38 … Complicated Versus Complex07:19 … A Design-Driven Toolkit08:58 … Is Agile Not For Complex Projects?11:43 … Mindsets, Practices, and Skills13:27 … “Why” Before “What” in a Complex Project17:06 … Inspiring the Shift to a Complexity Mindset20:42 … Individuals Hold Themselves Accountable23:08 … Conversations25:13 … Sense-Making27:18 … Adaption29:50 … Words of Advice31:48 … Get in Touch with Kieran33:24 … Closing KIERAN DUCK: You know, in complexity, I go back to it’s all connected.  No one person knows the answer.  So pick a good one.  Create the context that works well for this team.  And if they’re having a horrible experience, change it. I really believe that these projects can injure people, won’t take your finger off, but it can really blow people up.  And so create the right context for doing well. WENDY GROUNDS:  Welcome to Manage This, the podcast by project managers for project managers.  This is our bimonthly program where we like to talk about what matters to professional project managers.  And it’s our goal to give you some words of advice and to give you encouragement, where you can hear from other professionals and leaders in the field.  We’re glad you’re joining us.  If you like what you hear, please visit us at Velociteach.com and leave us a comment on our website. I am Wendy Grounds, and joining me in the studio is Bill Yates.  Our guest today is Kieran Duck.  Kieran is talking to us from Sydney.  He is an advisor and coach to senior leaders running complex projects and transforming organizations.  He has redesigned and rescued multibillion-dollar projects and led business transformations.  He’s also a global presenter on using design thinking to drive step changes in project and business performance.  He’s also recently authored a book called “The Complex Project Toolkit.” BILL YATES:  Yes.  The subtitle was “Using Design Thinking to Transform the Delivery of Your Hardest Projects.”  This is really intriguing to me.  You know, right from the cover he had me hooked.  And Kieran says, okay, look, I’ve seen this over and over and over in my career.  Maybe you guys can relate.  We have a way of managing standard projects, and it works well if your project is standard. But what if it’s complex?  What if there’s a level to this that just doesn’t fit that toolset?  And he gives the example of, you know, taking a hammer and trying to drive a screw into a board.  It’s ugly and doesn’t look very nice when you’re done with it.  So he makes the case for, okay, if you have a complex project, you need a different toolkit.  And then he describes the toolkit.  This is an intriguing conversation.  I think some people may even find it a little bit controversial. WENDY GROUNDS:  Yes. BILL YATES:  Because they don’t want to give up their standard tools. WENDY GROUNDS:  Yes, yes.  And Kieran welcomes that.  If you do find anything you disagree with, you’re welcome to reach out to him.  He’d love to hear your opinions, as well.  Kieran, welcome to Manage This.  Thank you so much for being our guest. KIERAN DUCK:  Thanks for inviting me.  Great to be here. The Complex Project Toolkit Book WENDY GROUNDS:  Yeah, we’re excited to talk to you.  I have enjoyed your book.  It’s an excellent book for project managers.  Can you just give us a little bit of background, and what sparked the book?  How did you come about writing this? KIERAN DUCK:  Yeah, that’s an interesting question.  I mean, over the years I’ve done a lot of work on project management, project rescues, business transformation.  And what I was doing wasn’t really described in project management books and models.  Much more of a focus on people, connecting people, understanding their motivations, taking time to rethink approaches.  So this isn’t really what you read about when you just hear about scoping and planning. Then a few years ago I worked with a design firm.  And what that did, it opened up a different way of thinking.  And it put a name to what I was doing.  You know, the more I explored design thinking, the more it explained this different way of approaching projects.  So I hadn’t seen this brought to life anywhere.  And I remember sitting on a plane flying back from a conference one time going, I’ve really got to write this down.  I saw that this is something that some people do quite naturally, but it’s also something that could be taught.  So it was really that desire to write down what I’ve seen as really effective practice when it comes to complexity. Standard Project Management vs. Managing Complex Projects BILL YATES:  One of the things that I appreciate that you do right at the beginning of the book is you say this is not replacing project management as you may be practicing it today. KIERAN DUCK:  Right. BILL YATES:  There are times when standard project management practices are perfectly appropriate.  For many, they would say throughout my lifetime or my career I can use standard project management methods and be successful.  However, there are certain projects that are just too complex.  That complexity meter gets dialed up.  And to your point, this book addresses those situations.  Talk to us a bit about that.  If you look at like standard project management approaches, how does that fall short when managing a complex project? KIERAN DUCK:  I think it’s useful to make clear what that distinction is.  You know, I talk about complicated being technically difficult.  You need to find all the parts; but, you know, it’s bounded.  Whereas complex projects are what I’d call socially difficult.  There’s a great example in Australia of when we built a big hydroelectric scheme in the 1950s.  We brought in people from overseas.  It was working in a whole new alpine wilderness area.  It took 25 years to build, but it finished on time, on budget.  And the problem there was coordinating all these resources.  But it was bringing in expertise from overseas. Now, interestingly, that finished in the 1970s.  By the 1990s, there were a whole bunch of environmental activists complaining about the fact that the dam had restricted flows downstream.  And so a campaign was started to restore the flows, at least some of the flows.  And it took until 2017 to do that.  You know, the point of that, it took 25 years to build this massive scheme of hundreds of kilometers of pipe, and it took 25 years to turn the flow back on.  So the first bit was complicated, but the second bit was complex.  And complex is about when you’ve got all these opinions involved and you, you know, there are five characteristics that I highlight. One of them is this idea that things are subjective.  Depends on your opinion.  The same information gives a different result.  The situation is connected so no one person can see the answer.  There’s not one person you go to to explain the whole situation; where often in complicated there’s an expert.  There’s somebody who can guide you through it.  I also talk about them being unknowable.  You don’t know what the problem’s going to be until you get into it.  And that’s what you see with that dam example is that things changed.  Politicians changed.  Everything kept changing on the way through.  So there’s no way to write a plan at the beginning and step all the way through it.  It was unique.  Nobody had done that before.  And it was constrained in that it was very high visibility, and lots of opinions involved.  And it really affects your degrees of freedom on a project when everybody’s playing in this game and adding their $.10 worth. Complicated Versus Complex BILL YATES:  That’s an excellent example.  The way you write about that in the book is perfect.  I think it lays out those characteristics and puts meat to it and helps you understand.  KIERAN DUCK:  Yeah, yeah.  I mean, the other one I used in the book to really bring it back to a fairly simple version is complicated versus complex.  If you think about how many fire stations you might need in a city, that’s a route optimization.  It’s a complicated problem.  Working all that out is complicated.  But the complexity comes when you’re trying to close one of those fire stations and trying to get an agreement, and everybody gets involved.  So when we see complicated problems, standard project works.  But when you get to complexity, and you’ve got all these opinions, you need an enhanced toolkit for that. A Design-Driven Toolkit WENDY GROUNDS:  Kieran, I want to talk about “The Complex Project Toolkit,” the book that you just published.  And you introduce the toolkit as a design-driven toolkit.  What do you mean by “design-driven”? KIERAN DUCK:  So for me, design thinking is a particular way of seeing the world.  The heart of it, it’s bringing people into consideration.  I make the argument that the standard project management comes from a scientific background.  It’s about modeling the future.  It’s about controlling and proving.  It has all these elements of science to it that came out of scientific management.  Within that, you’ve got to realize that the root of science is actually removing the individual.  Beginning in “Scientific Revolution” talked about removing the flawed experience of humans for science to be able to have something that’s provable, repeatable, and you understand the world by pulling it apart. Design thinking comes from a different place.  It comes from its belief that people are at the center,

At age 20, Christelle Kwizera founded Water Access Rwanda in response to the dangerous conditions that Rwandans would face when collecting water from rivers and dams, including crocodile attacks and disease-ridden water. Listen in to an inspiring project story as Christelle shares her vision to eradicate water scarcity while creating jobs for young people. This team had a goal to look for solutions that intersect the impact on planet and profit.

The podcast by project manager for project managers. We take a look at company culture, transforming remote work to and improving workplace productivity and efficiency.  How to Work Better Together. Hear about a new software company, Hive, which claims to have the first-ever democratically built project management platform. Table of Contents 03:05 … Hive History04:07 … Core Hive Philosophy05:38 … Democratically Built Features07:17 … Launching Hive09:22 … Challenges Today for Project Managers11:01 … Addressing Recurring Meetings15:17 … Applying Hive17:21 … Team Size Suited to Hive19:56 … Hive Innovation21:57 … Company Culture24:12 … Transforming a Team to Remote Work29:18 … New Hive Features30:01 … Who Influenced John32:47 … Get in Touch with John33:17 … Closing JOHN FURNEAUX: A brilliantly run meeting is a work of art and very, very impressive to those around you.  And I would encourage all of us to put 100% into our soft skills and how we manage the projects and the people around us. WENDY GROUNDS:  Welcome to Manage This, the podcast by project managers for project managers.  I’m Wendy Grounds, and joining me in the studio is Bill Yates.  I just want to let you know that you can still claim your free PDUs by listening to this podcast.  We have instructions on our website where it shows you exactly how you can claim your PDUs at PMI.  We still get listeners who struggle with that, and so we just thought we’d make sure we mentioned it.  So we are very excited that it is now Happy Birthday to Manage This, and we’ve been broadcasting for six years. BILL YATES:  That’s amazing, isn’t it?  Every month we have two podcasts.  We’ve been doing that for six years now.  Incredible authors, speakers, tools, and then people in the trenches doing projects, leading projects in diverse environments.  And it’s been a pleasure to bring this information to the community and just share it and let people pick up on new perspectives and get more advice on just how to be a more effective project manager. WENDY GROUNDS:  And we’re very grateful to our guests... BILL YATES:  Yes. WENDY GROUNDS:  ...who’ve made it possible.  We really appreciate all that they have brought to our podcast. BILL YATES:  Mm-hmm.  There’s no compensation.  We don’t pay them.  We just thank them and deeply appreciate the preparation and then their time in recording with us. WENDY GROUNDS:  And thank you to our listeners.  We value you, and we appreciate your support. BILL YATES:  That’s right.  Keep those ideas coming because that’s what spurs us on. WENDY GROUNDS:  Our guest today is John Furneaux.  John is the CEO and cofounder of Hive, which is the world’s first democratically built project management platform, used by many teams at places such as Comcast, Toyota, Starbucks, and many more.  A couple of times in the past we’ve brought you tools that are very useful or platforms that project managers can use.  And we just need to let you know we’re not getting any pay for this.  We’re not getting a free use of Hive.  It’s really... BILL YATES:  Right. WENDY GROUNDS:  ...the product comes across our eyes, and we think, gosh, this would be something interesting to tell you about.  And that’s why we’re here. BILL YATES:  Exactly.  As our listeners reach out to us with tools that are helpful or things that they want us to explore, just keep sending us those ideas because that’s where this one came from.  One of the things that appealed to me with Hive, too, is their mantra is “The first project management platform built for users, by users.”  And it kind of reminds me of our mantra of Manage This, “The podcast for project managers by project managers.”  So we’re going to talk about tactical aspects of this tool and how it can be used.  Then we’re going to back up and talk broadly about company culture, not just how Hive can influence that, but how John’s been influenced by different company cultures, and some advice that he can share with us. WENDY GROUNDS:  Hi, John.  Welcome to Manage This.  Thank you for joining us. JOHN FURNEAUX:  Thank you.  Thanks for having me. Hive History WENDY GROUNDS:  Can you give us some of the history of your company Hive, when it started, and how you started it? JOHN FURNEAUX:  Yeah, for sure.  So I myself was a frustrated project manager on some huge programs.  As you can hear I’m originally from the U.K.  Did some stuff with education, really exciting stuff, getting the sort of information network hooked up to all the schools in the U.K.  Felt frustrated, but realized I loved teamwork and helping people accomplish sort of their goals together, and went and joined a company that did just that, prior to Hive, but felt that there was even better solutions available.  And so we started Hive about five years ago now, 2016.  Cofounded it with Eric Typaldos, who is my sort of tech counterpart.  And yet here we are five years later.  It’s been a crazy journey. BILL YATES:  So Eric, his specialty is more on the tech side.  JOHN FURNEAUX:  Correct. BILL YATES:  What is your specialty, or what did you bring to the table as you guys started Hive? JOHN FURNEAUX:  Good question.  I hope that I bring to the table deep, deep, deep frontline experience of what real projects look like on a real day-to-day basis. Core Hive Philosophy BILL YATES:  So I love it that you describe yourself as a frustrated project manager, too.  Because to me it’s like many times in life, if I’m trying to recreate something, even if it’s trying to figure out some home repair issue, it’s usually from a point of frustration; right?  And then I get really motivated and passionate about it. So as we dive into Hive, it’s going to be interesting to hear some of the passion points that you had, things that you found lacking in the marketplace, or with some of the tools that you had used.  But let’s back up.  Kind of big picture, what’s the core philosophy with Hive? JOHN FURNEAUX:  Core philosophy behind Hive is two things that are unusual about Hive.  The first one is that Hive is the first-ever democratically built project management platform.  And that’s a very, very simple concept.  Everybody in the Hive community votes together on what they want to accomplish in Hive next from a product perspective.  And that keeps us uniquely focused on the practical day-to-day needs of our users, rather than a kind of ivory tower of product ideas that may or may not be useful to you when you’re coming to work on a Tuesday morning. And that really is the driving thing that we care about is, is Hive going to be practically useful to you when you come into work versus us foisting a philosophy of project management onto you that may not work in practice in the complex and stressful environment of real life projects. Democratically Built Features BILL YATES:  Democratically built, you vote on the product features.  How does that play out?  So how do you engage your user community to listen to the right voices?  Like I’m thinking of a stakeholder meeting or meetings I’ve had with project teams, and sometimes I’ll listen to the loudest voice in the room and then realize later, oh, wait a minute, that’s not the right person.  They’re just extremely passionate about something, but it’s not important to anybody else.  How do you guys go about vetting that? JOHN FURNEAUX:  Exactly right.  So that’s the beauty of democracy, huh?  One user, one vote.  So they can press that vote button as loudly as they like.  They’ve only got one vote. BILL YATES:  One time. JOHN FURNEAUX:  And the other person in the room who perhaps is more timid or whose voice is less frequently heard, they’ve got just as much power as the first person.  And if you think about it from a product management standpoint, it also works beautifully for us to be thoughtful about our larger customers and our smaller customers because we don’t think of our users in terms of being from a large company or a small company, nor do we need to because one user, one vote, by definition, the organizations who have lots and lots of users on Hive do have a larger voice collectively.  But ultimately it’s still one user, one vote; right? So each individual person on Hive has exactly the same shot of getting their feature built as anybody else.  And to give you a feel for how meaningful this is, two in three Hive users get a feature that they’ve requested built within the first year of them joining Hive.  So it’s really, really meaningful.  You’ve got two-thirds chance of getting something you’ve asked for built. Launching Hive BILL YATES:  That’s great.  Okay.  I’m going to confess to you, I am a fan of a podcast called “How I Built This.”  It’s an NPR podcast. JOHN FURNEAUX:  Yeah. BILL YATES:  So as I’m looking at a cofounder of a company, 2016, kind of in the back of my head the entrepreneur side of me is thinking, okay, you guys, you have an idea, you have a problem in the marketplace that you think you have a solution for, and you start to build it.  How long did you guys go pre-revenue? So you and Eric take off, you’re trying to build this thing, and you can tell me if you were still working full-time or, you know, doing this while delivering pizza or whatever.  So you’re getting all this feedback from the community and building and building.  And in 2016, when did you guys have something you could launch? JOHN FURNEAUX:  Bill, it was terrifying, as Eric will testify.  I bought a one-way ticket to New York, a town I had never lived in.  I had very little money in my pocket because I had left my previous job and had no savings.  And Eric and I moved to New York together within a day of each other and arrived to start building.  That was 2016.  And to answer your question about revenue, it was approximately a year before we invited anybody take a paid subscription. BILL YATES:  Right.  That’s impressive.

The 7th Edition PMBOK® Guide “represents the most disruptive redefinition of project management in my lifetime,” according to Jesse Fewell. Jesse was part of the core team writing this 7th Edition. We ask Jesse to explain the principles-based approach in this edition, as well as why, and how frequently, PMI releases a new edition. Jesse clarifies what has changed and what has not changed in the 7th Edition.

Great leaders are built from the inside out. Leadership training typically focuses on the externally visible behaviors of leadership; however, in this episode, we consider the parallel journey a leader should take internally to become an authentic leader. Darren Reinke is the author of The Savage Leader, a book which provides a blueprint for becoming a great leader through the adoption of 13 Savage Principles.

The Podcast by project managers for project managers. Hear how to approach complex modern projects by spending less time discussing the past and more time focused on the future. Eddie Obeng says we should: “take the learning back to the work place” by analyzing our past performance, and rapidly applying what we’ve learned to deliver perfect projects. Listen in for practical advice about facing your fears, organizational culture, and dealing with the challenges of change management.  Table of Contents 01:25 … Meet Eddie02:00 … QUBE – Learning and Transformation04:30 … QUBE for the Project Manager07:05 … Qubots08:00 … Delivering Projects by Looking Ahead11:06 … How do We Intentionally Mess up Projects?13:39 … Choosing the Right Project leader15:18 … Four Things We Mess up18:09 … Organization’s Culture Affecting a Project21:36 … Subconsciously Sabotaging Our Projects23:08 … Sabotaging Projects by Remaining Silent24:28 … Reporting Your Doubts and Fears27:58 … Change Management32:31 … Get in Touch with Eddie33:42 … Closing EDDIE OBENG: I’m asking you to look forward through the windscreen as opposed to the habit of let’s make a guess of what’s through the windscreen, and drive and manage, coordinate through the rearview mirror.  Completely different mindset. WENDY GROUNDS:  Welcome to Manage This, the podcast by project managers for project managers.  I’m your host, Wendy Grounds, and joining me is Bill Yates.  Just a quick note.  If you’re looking to acquire PDUs, Professional Development Units, towards your recertifications, you can still claim those PDUs for all our podcast episodes.  Just listen up at the end of the show for information on how you can do that. So today we have a really interesting guest.  This is Professor Eddie Obeng.  Professor Obeng was born in Ghana but has lived most of his life in the U.K.  He’s a world-class educator and has a passion for helping project managers. BILL YATES:  Yeah.  I’m going to give a quick preview of some of my favorite pieces of the conversation we’re going to have.  Eddie talks about recognizing the project environment and then choosing the best leadership approach based on one of four types of projects.  I think people are going to find that very useful and helpful.  Another thing, very practical advice that Eddie gives is facing your fear.  We talk about that, pretty straightforward.  And the teaser there is it’s okay if we don’t have all the answers in the moment.  I think that’ll be quite helpful to those listeners who are like me. Meet Eddie WENDY GROUNDS:  Hi, Eddie.  Welcome.  We’re looking forward to talking with you today. EDDIE OBENG:  Hello.  Delighted to be here. WENDY GROUNDS:  I want to know who is Eddie Obeng.  Can you tell us a little bit about yourself? EDDIE OBENG:  Just to give you some background, I teach.  I’m an educator.  I teach businesses, I help them transform, I do this based on material that I research myself.  And I built a virtual business school with a different way to teach people to deal with the complexity of the world.  And I’m also an entrepreneur because I took that business school, and I’ve made it digital, and I’ve got lots of people in the team and so on.  So that’s probably me.  I’ve written books, couple of bestsellers and stuff. QUBE – Learning and Transformation BILL YATES:  So tell us more about QUBE.  It’s Q-U-B-E.  Now, tell us more about this other environment. EDDIE OBENG:  Yeah, so QUBE is my shortcut to learning and transformation.  From the point of view of the person who is experiencing QUBE, literally everything you need to be able to do, which you’re struggling to do right now.  So for example we are on Skype, but you’re scribbling your different bits of paper.  Maybe if we’re in the same room we could write on a whiteboard.  And it would stay there, and you could come back later, and if we had lots of room, people could have offices to move around in.  And when I’m teaching you.  I could write on a whiteboard.  I could say “Off you go and have a break.  I’ll come back in five minutes.” So all the things which we want to do together, but we actually have to do when we’re dispersed, QUBE does all of those.  But the real secret sauce is because nobody knows how to behave on QUBE, you can use it both for learning and for transformation.  For example, corporations, which are very traditional, doing innovation.  They don’t know any better.  You say, now we need new ideas.  And then they all come up with new ideas.  They don’t argue with you.  So it’s like a little magic trick I have for getting people to learn and transform. BILL YATES:  What motivated you to create this environment? EDDIE OBENG:  Bit of background.  So I used to work at a proper business school, a place called Ashridge.  And we used to do in the old days, basically the companies would send these people to us as a sort of punishment or whether it was a prize.  We would inter them in that room for five days and talk at them. BILL YATES:  Yeah. EDDIE OBENG:  And then after five days they would emerge, and then we’d see them the next promotion step.  And then the world started accelerating.  So they went, we can’t come for five days.  We want three-day modules.  So they’d come, and we’d lock them up for three days instead.  But what never happened was we never took the learning back to the workplace with them.  So they’d leave, and you had no idea whether anything you taught them was any use, or what they’d done with it.  And I was quite determined that as the world was accelerating, it was important that we not only learned, but we put it into practice and transformed our organizations.  Question:  How do you do that without flying people backwards and forwards all the time? So I left Ashridge, and I started Pentacle.  And the idea behind Pentacle is really simple:  learn and do.  Then the question was how on earth do you do that with grownups?  And so that’s where QUBE came from.  It’s basically so we can keep people learning, trying out, building their confidence, dealing with their tutors, talking to the other colleagues, and then bringing them together to do some more learning as they transform their organizations.  It basically is a solution to the headache which everyone’s got, which is how on earth do you make change happen? BILL YATES:  Yes. QUBE for the Project Manager WENDY GROUNDS:  We like to tell our project managers about tools that they could use.  So how would you suggest that a project manager uses this within their organization? EDDIE OBENG:  Yeah.  So the best way to understand QUBE is I sometimes talk about it like a pyramid.  Because QUBE uses computers, everyone goes, oh, it’s a software tool.  A software tool would be something like a PowerPoint or a Miro, a Miro board or something like Office 365.  QUBE contains tools.  So if we’d been doing this on QUBE, the first thing we’d have done when we got together is we’d have chatted, like we did.  And then I would say, “Great, guys, within this podcast what are your greatest hopes?”  And we’d have gone to a whiteboard, and we’d have stuck up stickies of all the things you want from this.  Then I’d have said, “What are your greatest fears?”  And you’d have stuck up all of those.  And then we would have spent about a minute making sure none of the fears are going to come through before we started on the hopes. That’s what we call a “tool” on QUBE.  It’s a performance enhancement, people engagement tool called Hopes and Fears.  So the tools help people to think together and make their projects more aligned.  So that’s how we use tools.  Does that make sense?  BILL YATES:  Yeah.  So it’s like a platform that you bring familiar tools into, but it’s the environment of the platform they’re using. EDDIE OBENG:  Oh, I like you so much.  I can’t tell you how much I like you.  Because not only are there tools, but the way we would work together, if you were on QUBE as avatars, we call them Qubots, would be a room.  And we’d call the rooms – believe it – Qubicles with a Q. BILL YATES:  Of course. EDDIE OBENG:  Okay?  In the room there will be a whiteboard.  There will be a TV screen or computer screen where we can look at whatever we need to, or watch videos.  There’s probably somewhere else like a desk where we can leave sticky notes for each other.  Might be somewhere we can gather in a circle, a nice seating area with a sound bubble so we can have multiple conversations.  And so that’s what we call a platform.  But other people think of a platform as Slack or Teams or whatever else.  So you get platforms into our Qubicle.  The tools which are these performance tools easily get people working together and thinking together and delivering stuff straight away. But the whole game of course is learning and transformation.  So QUBE, the focus is on the learning and transformation, and the platform and tools are just to enable it.  So a project leader who just wanted to get some work done and was already scaled up would just pick up the right tool.  Working with other people, they probably invite them into the Qubicle.  But if they needed to learn something new, aha, now it gets interesting because now we have to diagnose what they want.  We have to understand where it fits in the context of their organization.  Then we have to understand what platform, what Qubicle, and what tools can they use instantly to start moving forward. Qubots WENDY GROUNDS:  It was really cool.  I loved watching that.  We saw the little avatars, and we took a look at it.  So very cool. EDDIE OBENG:  The avatars are really funny because we started with human-shaped avatars, and we discovered everyone spends all their time building their avatars.  And then we discovered there’s this really quite interesting bit of psychology here.

The podcast by project managers for project managers. The largest infrastructure project in the history of the Seattle Public Utilities is the Ship Canal Water Quality Project. Keith Ward talks about the lessons learned overseeing this 11-year initiative. Hear about estimating and revising a $570 million budget, and building strong relationships with multiple stakeholders and project teams. Table of Contents 01:37 … Keith’s Current SPU Role02:26 … Ship Canal Water Quality Program06:47 … Using Tunnels Instead of Tanks08:37 … A Tunnel Boring Machine11:39 … MudHoney15:12 … Project Stakeholders18:08 … Challenges with Multiple Teams22:06 … Project Funding23:20 … Federal Consent Decree25:31 … Budget Estimating for a Megaproject28:59 … When Costs Change31:44 … Budget Setting Lessons Learned32:54 … Monte Carlo Analysis38:47 … Tracking a Lengthy Project39:53 … Final Words of Advice41:10 … Get in Contact with Keith43:44 … Closing KEITH WARD: ...because I want people to learn from our lessons learned here. There’s a lot.  I’ve learned a lot personally, and it’s been a really eye-opening experience.  And I want to clarify, this is a megaproject.  This isn’t a $2 million project; right?  This is in another category.  So, and I think that’s one of the lessons learned is when you move into this megaproject, like over a half billion, the degree of uncertainty is huge, and you need to account for that.  That’s one of the kind of I would say über lessons learned. I’ve learned a lot personally, and it’s been a really eye-opening experience.  WENDY GROUNDS:  Welcome to Manage This, the podcast by project managers for project managers.  I’m Wendy Grounds, and in the studio with me is Bill Yates.  I want to say a big thank you to our listeners who reach out to us and leave comments on our website or on social media.  We love hearing from you.  And it was actually from a listener that we have today’s guest.  Chris Stoll reached out, and he recommended our guest who we’re talking to today.  And we are very grateful to Chris, and we appreciate it when any of you reach out to us and send us ideas of guests. So our guest today is Keith Ward.  He is currently the project executive of the Seattle Ship Canal Water Quality Project, and he’s going to go into some detail on that. BILL YATES:  We’re going to talk about tunnel boring machines, federal consent decrees, and MudHoney.  Are you ready for this? WENDY GROUNDS:  I’m ready for MudHoney.  Hi, Keith.  Welcome, and thank you for joining us today. KEITH WARD:  So nice to be here.  Thanks, Wendy. Keith’s Current SPU Role WENDY GROUNDS:  We saw that you have been with the Seattle Public Utilities since 2002.  Can you tell us about the services they provide, and your role in the company? KEITH WARD:  Sure.  So Seattle Public Utilities is kind of four utilities in one.  And I’ll kind of use the term “SPU” sometimes.  I’ll bounce back and forth.  We deliver essential water and waste services to about 1.5 million people in the Greater Seattle area.  So really our four services are drinking water, drainage and wastewater, and solid waste services.  I’ve had a variety of roles, mostly in project delivery, at SPU since coming onboard 2002.  My current role is the project executive on the Ship Canal Water Quality Project, which is the largest infrastructure project in the history of the organization. Ship Canal Water Quality Program BILL YATES:  Now, that we want to get into.  This Ship Canal Water Quality program, why was this initiated?  What’s the problem that it’s trying to address? KEITH WARD:  Yeah.  It’s a problem that’s common to many kind of older cities.  We don’t think of Seattle as always an older city.  But a lot of our infrastructure was built over a hundred years ago.  So this project was initiated in 2014 to solve the problem of what we call “combined sewage overflow.”  So back a hundred years ago there was no treatment for sewage, and they just basically installed one pipe in the street, and it went to the closest water body.  And that was common across the United States; right? BILL YATES:  It’s hard to imagine, but that was it; right?  That was the solution. KEITH WARD:  Exactly.  And those caused all kinds of problems with cholera and all kinds of different issues.  So this pipe has to convey both sewage and storm water from the streets and houses.  And it’s really the storm water that’s one of the biggest problems because in large storm events all this storm water or drainage comes into these pipes, which now we’ve hooked all these pipes up to tunnels, which eventually go to a wastewater treatment plant that the county owns.  So on a dry day, or a small storm, all this gets treated, and then it’s discharged, just like we want. But on really large flows, large rain events, it overwhelms the system.  And we either have to back up into residence and businesses or have it come out of the street, or we have – the City of Seattle has 82 overflow points across the city.  King County, our partner, has 35.  We need to basically overflow this.  And that can be harmful to fish, wildlife, and swimmers.  So both agencies, the City of Seattle and King County, are under federal consent decrees to reduce the number of these overflows.  And like I said, most agencies across the nation have been or are under similar consent decrees to fix these historical problems. So the Ship Canal is a local waterway and the focus of this project.  Currently, combined sewage overflows occur about 104 times per year on average.  And in 2020 these overflows represented about 56 million gallons of this polluted storm water and sewage out of our 85 million gallons total.  So this project will protect our waterways, keeping this polluted storm water and sewage out and improve public health by bringing these overflows down to less than one per overflow.  So basically we have six overflow locations.  We’re going to take them from 104 down to six.  And that will keep an average of more than 75 million gallons of combined sewage overflow out of this local waterway.  So that’s the problem that we’re trying to fix. And then let me just explain really quick the project itself.  And had I been involved earlier, I would have called the Ship Canal Water Quality Program because it’s really a program of four major construction projects.  In over a seven-year period we will end up constructing a 2.7-mile long, 18’10” diameter storage tunnel.  And this diameter is about the same as your standard transit tunnel.  So if you’ve ever been on a subway tunnel, that’s about an 18’10, kind of what we call your “bread and butter.”  And what will provide about 30 million gallons of storage capacity that we can put this combined sewage overflow into during these storm events. In order to get it down into this deep tunnel, we have to install five deep drop shafts at five neighborhood sites across the city.  These are vertical shafts that bring it down in and allow us to get in for maintenance.  And then we actually have to connect some flows around these shafts into the shafts, so we’re going to actually have two additional tunnels.  So we actually have three tunnels overall in the project, about a 650-foot long and 2,000-foot long tunnels.  One of these is underneath the Ship Canal.  That’s currently actually being mined right now.  And once we finish all of our tunnels, we will basically, in our shaft that we’re using for all the tunneling, when they’re finished we will build a 12-million gallon per day pump station that will basically drain the tunnel when the treatment plant is ready so that we can get ready for the next storm.  So that’s the entire program. Using Tunnels Instead of Tanks BILL YATES:  I’ve just got to bring this up because Seattle is a beautiful city, one of the most beautiful cities certainly in the U.S., if not in the world.  There’s water all around it.  There’s Puget Sound, there’s Lake Washington, the ocean.  It’s just gorgeous.  And I think about what you’re doing, you’re preserving the beauty of Seattle and the water that is there.  So you guys chose tunnels instead of tanks, which I appreciate because, you know, no matter what kind of artwork you put on it, a tank is still a tank.  Talk about the complexity that was added by choosing tunnels instead of tanks. KEITH WARD:  Sure.  These were early decisions between the two agencies and when they decided to kind of come together.  Started back in 2013.  So we have different tools in our toolbox to solve this problem.  When you get really large volumes like this, you need to go to what we call “storage” or “tanks.”  These generally in an urban environment would be underground concrete tanks.  So we were kind of looking at installing at each of these six locations underground storage tanks.  But you need a lot of property to do that.  So we would have had to condemn private property, and there would have been a lot of construction impacts, much more than when you’re doing a tunnel. So that led us to start thinking about, first of all, a tunnel, and then a share tunnel.  And the cost ended up being about the same.  We ended up going down the share tunnel route because it would be much less impact for the local communities, less condemnation.  And actually, because it’s over three miles, it gives us more operational flexibility because what we’re starting to see is kind of storm patterns changing where we get these micro storms.  So on one end of the tunnel we may get a really hard storm, and on the other end it’s not as bad.  So instead of just having one tank, we can put more into the tunnel at that specific location. A Tunnel Boring Machine WENDY GROUNDS:  We did a podcast a while back with the Atlanta Watershed Project.  They described using a tunnel-boring machine to work through the tunnels that they’re building here in Atlanta.

The podcast by project manager for project managers. “Why you work determines how well you work.” Finding our Why impacts how well we lead a project, and enables team members to stay focused and motivated to finish the project successfully. Listen in for valuable advice on resilience, motivation, and “growing your grit” to help project managers envision their potential and build stronger teams. Table of Contents 03:25 … Finding Your Why: A Look at Past Guests06:58 … Prepare To Roar Expeditions08:32 … The Riverbend Group09:18 … Embarking on a Major career Change11:08 … Doreen’s Story: Identifying Her Why12:48 … The Impact of Your Why14:01 … Relating the Why to Projects16:27 … Project Teams: Aligning Your Whys19:27 … Making it a Priority21:43 … Goals vs. Whys24:34 … Cultural Drivers Affecting our Choices30:35 … Resilience and Long Term Goals32:26 … Misconceptions about Motivation34:19 … Becoming Motivated36:39 … Key Factors of staying Motivated37:57 … Our Differences and Growing Grit39:34 … Are You at a Crossroads?42:40 … Get in Touch with Doreen44:01 … Closing DOREEN LINNEMAN: ...and because of that the world is just reeling with change, and change is happening all the time.  And as scary as that is, the beauty about that is people’s postures are open for change.  Normally as humans we resist change.  But people are expectant for change.  They have just been forced to do it.  It’s like, oh, what’s coming next?  And with that is a gift.  It’s a huge gift for all of us.  If we laser focus here on just being your professional legacy, very rarely do you get the opportunity to change it, or to change a trajectory.  Really the only time you get to do it is when you leave a company.  Right?  And you get to start over and build up reputation from scratch. What’s beautiful about the situation of moving past and through COVID is that, again, everybody is expectant to change.  And quite frankly, if you’re a leader who doesn’t change, I mean, shame on you.  How could you not go through what we’ve just gone through and not lead differently?  Right?  Your people want you to.  They’re ready for you to.  It’s just such a perfect opportunity to put a stake in the ground and be like, what do I want to be remembered for?  Who do I want to serve?  How do I want to be?  What is the legacy I’ll want to be?  And to start to make that shift.  And if it seems daunting, then you go back to those micro goals. ...but now is the time, because what you will not regret are making the changes. WENDY GROUNDS:  You’re listening to Manage This, the podcast by project managers for project managers.  I am Wendy Grounds, and joining me is Bill Yates.  We’re so glad that you’re joining us today.  And if you enjoy this episode, please visit us at Velociteach.com.  You can leave a comment for us on our Manage This Podcast page.  We always like hearing from you. And remember you can still claim your free PDUs.   Our PDU claim page has the new instructions.  Make sure not to use the autofill, but type in “Velociteach” and the title when you are submitting your PDUs.  So I’m very excited.  Today we have a guest in the studio with us. BILL YATES:  Yes.      WENDY GROUNDS:  And we always love getting to personally meet our guests and not have to talk on Skype all the time. BILL YATES:  Right. WENDY GROUNDS:  Doreen Linneman is a keynote speaker, she focuses on management consulting, professional development team building.  She really takes leadership and professional development out of the boardroom and into nature, doesn’t she. BILL YATES:  Yes, she does.  That’s an understatement.  She’s got three companies that she started, and one’s called Prepare to Roar.  We’ll hear more about that.  But that involves taking leaders out of the boardroom, out of the conference rooms and  all the coffee and doughnuts, and putting them in nature and having them face some of their biggest fears, like these gorillas or sharks or different things like that. WENDY GROUNDS:  She’s got some incredible stories.  I’ve also noticed in her bio she’s a certified mental toughness facilitator and trainer, and she’s completed the Navy SEALFIT Leadership Academy.  So she’s got some punch there. BILL YATES:  Yes, absolutely.  She has got some game.  I can’t wait to have Doreen talk with us about her experiences.  And she’s an accomplished athlete, as well.  She’s finished the Ironman Triathlon three times, which is just amazing.  So we’re delighted to have her here in our studio to share some of her wisdom with us. Finding Your Why: A Look at Past Guests WENDY GROUNDS:  One of the main topics we’re talking about is the why, or the purpose behind the what of what we do.  And we’re going to get deeper into that with Doreen when we talk with her.  But while we were talking about this, Bill and I just went through some of our past episodes on our podcast, and looked at guests that we’ve had who’ve had very strong whys. BILL YATES:  Yeah.  Oh, yeah.  Let me just start with one.  Episode 86 we talked with Doc Watson, and that was on saving rhinos with Connected Conservation.  Here’s a quote from Doc:  “I think there was almost a calling, if I could call it that, where I could marry technology to conservation and have a look at saving species.” WENDY GROUNDS:  More recently we talked to Jody Staruk, and she is a woman who’s leading the way in construction projects.  And she had been asked to be the first female executive of her company.  And in Episode 132, the quote she gave was to her boss.  She said:  “You’re asking me to be the first female executive of the company, which means it can’t fail because, whether it’s my decision or not, it will never be viewed that way.  I don’t want to send that message to younger women in the company.”  And so she took on a big task, and she succeeded. BILL YATES:  Yes, she did, yes.  The desire to help others and step beyond yourself, that theme came out.  Mark Von Tillow, Episode 80:  In Case of Fire, Handle With Courage.  Mark said he was moved into what he does after his father’s sudden passing.  And to quote Mark:  “That was really my first exposure to that.  And I thought, you know, I’d like to be that person someday, trying to help somebody.  So that’s really where it started.” WENDY GROUNDS:  We could go on all day and just do a podcast quoting our guests.  You know, they’ve made an impact on us.  They’ve touched us with their story.  And one that’s really touched my heart is Peter Baines.  This was Episode 126:  Leading Through Tragedy, Finding Purpose.  And I’m just going to read Peter’s quote.  He says:  “We need to understand our real clarity of purpose, or why we do what we do.  And for leaders it’s when we should be bringing that into our teams.”  He has an amazing story of going through tragedy of seeing the tsunami victims and why he went to help the children there. BILL YATES:  A final one that I’ve got to mention, Dr. James Crowe, Episode 124:  A Vital Project – Pursuing Antibody Science in a Pandemic.  Dr. Crowe shared that he started out as a pediatrician.  And just to quote him:  “Ultimately I trained as an infectious disease specialist to try to work on prevention of disease, infectious diseases particularly, for the world’s most vulnerable people.  And that ultimately led me to science.”  So again, that motivation and kind of the story behind the story with those who have gone on to do projects that make such a difference in the world. WENDY GROUNDS:  Yeah. BILL YATES:  Wendy, this is crazy.  We could talk all day about some of these guests and some of the things that have motivated them with their projects.  I’m just thinking about orbital space debris.  I’m thinking about removing plastic from the oceans.  There are so many examples.  I’m really excited to be able to have this conversation with Doreen. WENDY GROUNDS:  Yes.  Doreen, we’re so glad to have you here today.  Thank you for joining us. DOREEN LINNEMAN:  Oh, thank you so much.  I am fired up to be here this morning, really excited. WENDY GROUNDS:  I’m glad to hear you’re fired up because I know you’ve just had a bit of jet lag coming in. DOREEN LINNEMAN:  Yes.  I had 10 hours and 45 minutes of sleep last night, so I am amazing. BILL YATES:  Good. DOREEN LINNEMAN:  I think I’ve conquered the Serengeti jet lag for sure. Prepare to Roar Expedition WENDY GROUNDS:  Why don’t you tell us about that?  Tell us about the trip you’ve been on. DOREEN LINNEMAN:  Yeah, I just got back from a Prepare to Roar expedition, which is one of my companies.  And it’s kind of this unique intersection of blood and wine or sweat and wine.  It’s all about helping people professionally or personally find and live their best life, goal-setting.  I get corporate executives come.  I get families.  And I get teams.  And this one was all about goal-setting.  We use the big cats of the Serengeti – the lions, leopards, and cheetahs – to teach us about identifying your prey or your goal, and then design your hunting strategy.  So I just left four or five executives fired up to finish their 2021 strong. BILL YATES:  How long were you there? DOREEN LINNEMAN:  For the program, this particular program was five nights in the Serengeti.  And then I stayed a little bit extra to sharpen my saw when it comes to identifying birds by sound.  And my guides, I’m an expert on vultures now, and termites.  So I spent a couple extra days down there to sharpen my skills, as well. WENDY GROUNDS:  I know that you do other expeditions, as well.  I’ve been very interested in the shark one done near Cape Town? DOREEN LINNEMAN:  Yeah, the shark one.  I’m a little conflicted about that one right now with nature, whether or not I want to continue that one and making sure that I’m honoring the animals, and we’re doing things in a right way.  But we have an amazing one about risk and going for it in the jungles of Belize.