Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

In which we reward folks for solving problems, but we don’t ask about how the problem arrived or who created it.

This is an old story told to me by a long-retired colleague.

There was once this big contract that lasted several years. At the monthly review, the project manager for the contracted company would report a problem and the horror of it all and how they were gathering the forces to fix it.

At the next monthly review, the company’s project manager would report that they fixed the problem and saved the damsel or the day or the project or something that deserved saving. What the project manager wouldn’t explain was that they had solved the problem the day after they found it and the week after they caused it.

The company’s project manager wasn’t a good actor, and everyone knew what was happening.

They awarded the company’s project manager a Dragon Slayer Award. There are no such things as dragons; dragons are merely myths and live only in our imagination. The great and horrible problems solved by the project manager were equally mythical.

We see this example in many places today. Facebook—just one famous example, we could cite others— now and then announces how they have found and vanquished a dragon from our midst. Of course Facebook created a situation where dragons could walk in the the front door and sit in our living room. They don’t report that bad mistake.

Beware of the Dragon Slayer and the mythical dragons they slay. They often created these dragons just so they could have something to slay and something to say during a monthly review. You gotta’ justify your salary somehow.