Left-brain management and right-brain organizing

Reading about taking team members off a project where everything seems to be going well, only to put them onto a failing one, did you have a sense of déjà vu? Your circumstances and experiences are probably different, but situations like these are quite common and, as it is highly likely a successful project will be derailed, the question is: why? Followed by: what do you do about it, or what can you do about it? Jeff’s answer to the first is that, when they assess how a project is going, project teams and the managers who make these decisions aren’t thinking about the same things. Their different ideas about what matters—actually different values—are a source of tension. “Tension” suggests a spring under pressure, or, as he sketched it, forces pulling in opposite directions (see Figure 4.2). What to do is more complicated. The immediate response depends a lot on the personalities involved, their motives, attitudes, and relationships. Can Jeff persuade someone (possibly Melvin, although he isn’t sure who made the decision) to reverse it? The larger agenda, though, is to do something about eliminating the tension, so that people who aren’t part of the team effort aren’t inclined to mess with success.