Millestones Comments Off

A lot of smart people will tell you that the way to accomplish a daunting task you have set your mind on, be it writing a book, finishing a redesign of your website, running a marathon or changing some aspect of your life, is to keep your eyes on the goal and take it one step at the time.

Humans are driven by emotions, and the feeling that nothing is being accomplished is one of the nastiest moral-breakers of all. Especially if you look ahead at something that requires months or years of effort. The trick of getting around this is to split the humongous task we have before us into smaller tasks and take it one step at the time.

This is nothing new, all project management tecniques work with some sort of a milestone system, very smart people like Tom Peters make a great case about how milestones can be used.

However, the best example I have ever seen of how milestones can be a life-saver, literally, is the movie Touching the Void, as Imdb puts it “The true story of two climbers and their perilous journey up the west face of Siula Grande in the Peruvian Andes in 1985″. Besides the amazing story and will of the two look at the movie from the point of view of milestones. One of them measured his milestones in meters, as he inched down from the mountain.

Same happens in a marathon, you set your mind to get to the next bend, one more kilometer, a few more steps. If you think that you still have 30km to go, you have the real chance of your moral letting you down. In the same time, you need to know why you are running one more kilometer, and that is to be closer to the finish.

For me the story in Touching the Void is the best, real-life example of milestones used to get an unthinkably difficult task finished.

What makes groups resist to change Comments Off

A little out of place?

Have you ever watched a friend or family member work frantically, almost in panic to do some task, while you inexplicably seemed to want to just get out of the way and do as little as possible, although you know you should be helping? Have you ever asked yourself why you might be doing this?

I am convinced there is a strong tendency, in every social group, be it family members, freinds, a project team at work, the local reading club, to keep an acceptable level of excitement or placidity, acceptable by all. No one likes people dancing on the tables at the book club or people reading a book, sitting quietly in a corner at a night club. That part of our brain that wants only safety does not like extremes.

You can call it acceptable behavior or whatever you like, I will call it the Excitment vs Placidity Index (EVPI). All is well while the EVPI stays glued to the commonly accepted level. However, life has is not as predictable as some fantasize and sometimes things don’t go as planned.

And so you get the family meetings when the self-labeled black-sheep defends an idea that is completely opposite to what everybody else think they believe in, a group of coworkers in which one person depicts with such energy and fury some idea that the rest seem to shrink in their chairs. Or the reverse. A group of friends at a concert, excited and jumping, and the one guy who seems more bored of attending concerts that a cow is of chewing grass.

What goes wrong here? What’s with this differences? And what happens when the group is faced with this discrepancies. As I see it there are two outcomes:
- conflict
- equilibrium

You either get somebody stand up, usually a power figure in the group, and say ‘Geroge, just sit down and stop making a fool of yourslef’ or, the group works toward adjusting the EVPI to the usual value or a new level of acceptability for this EVPI is considered, at least temporarily. Big words for simple things. If somebody starts dancig on the tables the rest will wither make that person feel emarassed and come down, they’ll follow the example or they’ll get into a fight and put the wild dancer outside the boundaries of the group. Check out this guy (it gets interesting after around 1 minute):

Read Seth’s comments about this clip, written from the perspective of his book Tribes.

I believe there is a very strong social force, in every group, that fights to preserve the usual acceptable level of the EVPI. Not too much excitment, not too much placidity, just enough to make you be part of your group. A Rock concert is heavy on the excitement, a bus ticket line is high on placidity.

Next time when somebody, maybe from your friends, family or coworkers seems to be more than usually excited and you seem to be sitting in you chair and beeing more quiet that usual ask yourself, what are you doing? are fighting to keep the acceptable level of Excitment vs Placidity? And if yes, why? And should you?

The same force is one of the reasons it’s so difficult to move a group of people with a very well established level of acceptable excitement vs placidity entwined into the very fabric of the group. I believe that understanding this is hugely important if you want to bring change inside a group.

A maze of a city – New York Comments Off

Picture taken by Liviu on one 42 E and 3rd in NY

There are some things that need to be seen to be believed or understood. For sure such a place is New York. As someone who spent his life in Europe, out of which around 5 years in Russia and the Ukraine, understanding how a city like New York can even function is tough. The amount of people going there and back, the relative small surface of the city, which gives the incredible density, the noise, the trucks. It is truly the city that never sleeps.

It’s hard to describe after seeing it for the first time so I’ll just shamelessly use a comparison I’ve heard which said that New York is like a big maze, you run around blindly without having the need to exit it, the high buildings are like walls and you can only see what’s in front, left or right. It’s the perfect place to disappear in the crowd.

So, if you ask me to describe New York, as I see it, I’ll just say – It’s like a giant maze for people in search of something. It is also amazing. If you never been there and have the chance to see it, DO IT. You might like it, you might not, but you will be impressed in a way or another, trust me on this.

This article is part of a short series about the U.S. through my eyes, a first time visitor.