Brick on Brick, Without a Plan

The Art of Communication

The art of communication is one that should never be left without nurture. It is a skill I have honed since childhood, when making myself heard, and hopefully understood, mattered.

I know the many times in my working life when being articulate, honest, truthful, clear, and detailed about ideas, events, or situations has been the difference between staying put and being walked out of the door with alacrity.

Conflict and the Power of Words

Conflict leers around the office or the workplace, where genuine engagement can easily slide into belittlement and being patronised. Both could be mistaken for compliments, only to be turned into something backhanded or used to upbraid you.

Besides that, there are the power plays and egos, where choosing your words carefully can significantly change the tone of an exchange. Drawing on a wealth of vocabulary with studied deployment is hardly putting the quality of your education to waste.

Finding the Right Analogy

When the going gets tough, and it usually does, finding the correct analogy to depict a situation becomes the best tool to deploy.

Consider a scenario where a user expected us to exhaust every avenue to determine why his anticipated long-running script terminated after two hours, even though nothing on the system had changed.

I posited that when a washing machine does not complete a wash cycle, you explore issues with the device, the water supply, or the connection to the mains; you do not ask for a building inspection.

That thought came to me as I finished taking a shower.

A Managerial and Political Issue

This afternoon, I was met with a complex managerial and political issue. For all my protestations about the guidelines, framework, and structure needed to govern a process that I felt left us exposed, all management wanted was for us to do something, anything, first, before addressing concerns that would fill reams of paper dating back to July last year.

After I had answered a series of questions, the activity was cherry-picked out of a larger case for correct procedure and directed towards a decision to be enforced.

In what I could only term a dare to challenge authority and face the consequences of stepping out of line, the manager, now assuming control where earlier they had failed to provide support, asked on the Microsoft Teams group chat:

The Challenge on Teams

"Everyone, anyone here unhappy with the approach?"

He might as well have said, "Anyone up for a fight? I'm here to bludgeon you."

I was dissatisfied, but this required tact, and there came the inspiration for another analogy.

The Bricklayer Analogy

"To put it another way, we are the bricklayers, and you want a house for which no architect has been engaged to design and no structural engineer has assessed. We are just putting brick on brick and hoping we end up with a shelter everyone can use."

As bricklayers, we know what houses should look like, but without a plan, a lot can go wrong. My job is to paint the picture; how you appreciate that work of art is beyond my ability to dictate, but the work has been done.

It will sink in somehow, and the message will not be lost in the morass of politicking and power plays.

Eloquence as Construction, Not Evasion

Let me be clear about one thing: eloquence here is not a tool of evasiveness. It is the means by which I explain and construct a clear narrative of the risk profile of an activity, one that could lead to penalties, the loss of professional reputation, or a negative impact on business operations and the user community.

Knowledge shared through such communication exposes the blind spots and pitfalls that are usually not taken into consideration.

Nor is this a matter of perfecting a process. There is no process. What we have is a range of assumptions that have not been properly tested or validated, yet are forced into implementation by expediency.

There is a further purpose to all this. By communicating in this way, one is also documenting the issues, so that when the matter of responsibility for any action arises, the points made earlier will show that management was informed and chose to act against the identified risks they had been asked to appreciate.

Experience Speaks for Itself

Many of us might hold junior roles in the multilayered hierarchy of the organisation, but never confuse our positions with a lack of maturity.

After 40 years in this business, where this is probably one of the least significant roles I have held in 30 years, I think I know a fair amount about management, and about being managed, and about getting a point across without equivocation.

We didn't just start at this yesterday.

A Google NotebookLM AI Podcast on this blog

Thought Picnic: What really is the purpose of the interview?

Between the means and the end

Interviews as one would expect are a means of engagement to ascertain if a candidate for a role is first able to do what is contained in the job specification and beyond and to determine if the said person is a good fit for the team, department, and organisation into which they are being assessed and invited.

In general, I would think a curriculum vitae should speak for itself in terms of what was done, achieved and how that activity benefitted that setting. In my case, because the general rule especially in the UK is to have a 3-page or shorter CV, a wealth of experience and expertise running decades is difficult to encapsulate in such a short space. For that reason, I have a link to a much longer resume in the narrative, quite detailed for anyone interested.

Against the odds of poor preparation

Expertise is knowhow and would by inference be recent and attending to the role applied for, experience brings in a long more over time, by observation, involvement, practice, understanding, and even the ability to explain in some appreciable detail the hows and whys of things.

The question then is, how to set up an interview in such a way that the engagement allows the interviewer to tighten their enquiry to gain the best indication of ability, agility, and compatibility meeting their requirements. I am now concluding that no preparation on the part of the interviewee can prepare them for a poorly planned interview.

I have received commendations after attending interviews where the feedback has been, that I am likeable and knowledgeable, but I did not address the interview questions to the detail required. Also, the additional feedback has suggested that the roles have been readvertised because none of the tranches of interviewees were selected for the role. We probably can agree that this is a problem with the interview than the interviewees.

Ask concise and relevant questions

The quality of the answers you get from an interviewee have to be related to the standard of questions asked. It goes without saying that the quality of search results for a standard search request is dependent on how well and unambiguous the search terms are phrased. In these times of generative AI, the same principle follows, a well-crafted prompt will elicit good responses close to what the inquirer requires.

How this fundamental principle does not filter into interviews does baffle me. Again, I have probably interviewed better when I have had to give a presentation from a range of selected topics or dealt with scenarios proffered that would assess my quality of thinking, problem-resolution ability, and general perspective on issues. Sadly, very few interviewers adopt this line of enquiry.

In a lake of mysterious misery

For instance, you would probably get an interview question that is worded along the lines of, ‘Cross the lake.’ You are then left wondering where is the lake? Are there crossing points along the lake shore and from what crossing point to the other? Does the lake have bridges, pontoons, and boats, or do you have to consider swimming, if you cannot swim? How long do you have to cross the lake? Is the lake infested with crocodiles or other dangerous animals?

Let me paint the scenario in this analogy, a lake where the supposed interviewer is a fisherman, with apparently extensive knowledge of the lake, the best times to fish and what types of fish thrive therein, where the water source is, the weather and seasons to expect at what times, maybe even has done night rescues of people in distress and the question he asks a visiting fisherman interviewee reads like he doesn’t know anything about bodies of water.

So many scenarios can be built around crossing the lake with additional information to help the interviewee address the issues or thinking that would help the best lake crossing, if just for themselves or in consideration of others where probably a bridge would suffice rather than a boat as someone would have to row the boat back to the crossing point.

Poor questions won’t yield good prospects

Indeed, I am aghast with the quality of the technical questions I face, they are general, rudimentary, elementary, fundamental, and broad. When asked by the supposedly highly technical person, you are left wondering why they are not asking questions built around scenarios and issues they have encountered with the guardrails to refine the responses with follow-up questions?

It is incumbent on interviewers to prepare for interviews just as much as interviewees prepare with some kind of interview preparation. What seems to be happening is the interviewer seems to be winging it, in the end, they never really determine suitability because they have been lazy and the waste of time on both sides is not compensated for, with disappointment on the side of the interviewee and self-created disappointment on the side of the interviewer.

What really is the purpose of the interview? I am left unsure of whether that very basic idea is known.

Answering a challenge for eligibility

Looking at your vulnerable side

Having a sit down to talk and have a conversation with people for professional services is quite an interesting thing, especially where an assessment is being made of whether the professional or assessor can help you. The day before, I had met with a prospective buddy/mentor, we decided to meet again when it seemed there was no point of agreement or meeting of minds.

It was in a conversation with my consultant some weeks ago that we agreed that on her referral, I could avail myself of counselling rather than request it on my own pre-empting.

I think I have convinced myself that I am quite articulate, I have a disciplined or call it measured way of talking about myself that exudes qualities of clarity of mind, understanding of issues, elaboration of detail, and building relatable narratives.

Making sense of the complexities

Interestingly, for the first time, I linked together a whole range of life events walking backwards from situation to Genesis, a framework that had developed in the many blogs I had written but never laid out in a string of unintended and yet natural chain of occurrences.

The questions I was asked were supposed to elicit concepts and ideas upon which a decision could be made to put me in line for engagement, but it got to the point where it was first opined that I might not need the service and hence, I needed to assert by whatever means why I felt they could be of help.

An analogy for counsel provision

I had never thought of it before, it was like I was given utterance to address the challenge as I spoke. I started with every journey has a road to a destination, the destination sometimes is what is required and nothing else. However, consider if on that journey, you were driving and then you had a diversion or probably you had a tyre puncture that meant you had to stop to change the tyre.

That interruption to your journey is worth considering in terms of delaying you getting to your destination, bringing some new experience into view, what you might have run over to cause the puncture, how to avoid such punctures, like navigating another route, being conscious of the related hazards, and how to have a better journey.

The focus has moved from the destination to the experience in the journey which is part of the tapestry of life itself. Surely, all that is significant. I think that analogy helped considerably, he nodded, acknowledged how useful the illustration was and I think he was a bit more convinced that there was scope for me to access services.

In what I thought would be just an hour of conversation, over 90 minutes went into the chat that I found myself running late for my welcoming stint at the cathedral. Meanwhile, there is a waiting list and maybe soon, I would be getting a call.

A project for colourful analogy

Tautology of analogy

Somehow, I have become a master of analogies when it comes to understanding and explaining topics, ideas, issues or circumstances in my profession.

The project I am currently involved in is another classic in the many projects I have embarked upon where the salient lesson ends up being how not to do projects.

Interestingly, NaijaBlog highlighted issues with poor project management in Nigeria, but I can say that it is no better in Europe.

What is amazing is that we have professional project managers with Prince 2, Princess 3, Queen 4, King 5 and Emperor 6 project management qualifications but not an iota of genius has materialised from such great learning.

All sold on a whim

The first analogy stemmed from the situation where the project managers through their boss announced to their corporate community that they would deliver a product for live deployment in 2 weeks – no problem with that – however, if the project managers have not consulted their core resources, of which I was one, about that possibility, they would have sold a luxury car without having first seen the prototype.

I have read my CV over and over again, I have not found the words miracle or worker anywhere on the CV, in fact, this blog contains the first instance of those two words in such close proximity when talking of myself.

Then, there is the other part where it appears this project which is an activity of centralising and consolidating the business and resources to one country, there are many all around the place who have basically been deliberately sabotaging the project not to talk of the fact that there are so many chiefs in the canoe, not one space for the overworked Indian to row the boat.

Stunned at the sight of Medusa

However, this is the big picture, somehow, we all have paintbrushes with the mind that we are all together painting a figure whose name starts with M, some are expecting something serene, enduring and captivating like Mona Lisa; some are so clueless, they are making a Mess; some dare to fantasise and think it would be Marilyn Monroe with the air up her skirt, however, at the unveiling, we ended up with Medusa, such that we were shocked to stone – that is real-life project management as I have seen it in many enterprises.

My weekends are my weekends

In view of the poor project management and the atrocious impediments of staff that have thwarted every purpose we have tried to assert not to talk of the how 10-minute job have taken the best part of 10-hours with no resolution in sight, someone has the temerity to request my presence for the weekend – fat chance.

I rarely do weekends at work, not for the money not for the fun, my weekends are for myself especially if the whole week has milked 10 hour days – something has to give and what should give is a revelation of rotten project management and planning, more so, those who demand so many hours are out of the door before the clock chimes five.

Did I say that?

Twice, I have blurted out an expletive in utter exasperation bordering on apoplexy, how is it that these people just do not seem to look like the ordinary man in the street?

Joined-up thinking is just as rare as joined-up writing, though in spite of it all, I would deliver a product that is fit for purpose catering for my customer base which includes the users, the administrators and the enterprise.

I have another month of doing this stuff, the lesson would be well learnt – How not to do projects.