Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

As much as we might wish otherwise, reality applies to us, too.

I was recently speaking with a group of people age 13 to 60. My question was:

How far back can you remember?

The near-unanimous answer was, “age three.” Some people could vaguely remember some things that happened when they were age two, but that was rare and the memories were pretty fuzzy.

At that moment, it struck me that my grandson, my oldest grandchild, would have his third birthday in a few weeks. I turned to my wife and told her that he probably won’t remember any of the things we have done with him up to this time.

She denied my claim. Surely, our grandson would remember all the things we had done together during his first two years of life. Surely, he would be the exception. Surely, he would share the wonderful memories that we have of his infant and toddler life.

My wife is not much different from the rest of us. We can sit in a room full of people who have one experience (e.g., not remembering life before age three) and then assume that we will be different. Reality will not apply to us.

I see this often in business and engineering. Reality shows that using practices A, B, and C on a project greatly increases the chance of success. The trouble is that A, B, and C aren’t much fun, and although they apply to 99% of organizations on 99% of projects, we can skip them and still succeed.

Wrong, because reality applies to us, too.

Why can’t someone fix this? Why can’t someone find a way that applies reality to everyone else, but no us? Someone could probably make a lot of money with that one.