Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

Managers often start things that they cannot sustain. Great endeavors begin with gusto, but fade away quietly. I dislike these. There are ways around the continual disappointment of the unsustainable.

I’ll never forget the evening. My dad had pulled out his slide projector (in case your are too young to recall these machines, see Wikipedia’s article on them), set up his screen, and started showing us slides. I was a little boy (don’t remember the exact age) in wonder of all this technology.

My dad showed picture after picture of my mother and my older brother when he was a baby and about one year old. There he was crawling. There he was learning to walk. There he was walking. Wow, neat. I couldn’t wait to see what I looked like doing those things.

Something went wrong; there were no pictures of me at that age, and the same was missing for my younger brother. Where were we? I knew my dad’s camera wasn’t broken because I had seen him using it. Where were we?

This is a story of sustainability, or in this case non-sustainability. My dad had fallen to a common malady – take lots of photos of the first child, but just lose interest in the photo stuff with the rest of the kids. Aha, the key words:

just lose interest

Those words describe many of the efforts I have seen at work over the past three decades. Managers start a program with great gusto, but somewhere along the line they just lose interest and everything fades away. The effort was not sustainable.

Perhaps it is my temperament; perhaps it is the scars from that evening watching photos of my older brother, but sustainability has always been a big issue with me.

I don’t start things that I cannot sustain

This may have kept me from trying new things over the years. I believe that more times than not it has pushed me to finish the things that I started. It has also brought pain to me to see others start things that are clearly not sustainable.

There are things to do that help with this fear-of-the-unsustainable. Most have to do with limiting the scope of something when you start it. I recommend these practices (I am going to start this now, try it for three weeks, and reassess). If nothing else, consider the little boy sitting on the floor in front of the screen waiting for photos of himself that never appear.