9. Facilitating Complex Projects

It is always possible to take something into a conversation to structure it and make it intelligent, and a mistake to go into any conversation empty handed.

Julian’s re-representation of his data model as a system of interconnected spreadsheets respects the intelligence of the people involved in the collaborative project without dumbing things down and gives them an environment where they can explore the data on their own terms.

When we are doing our best to represent complexity in deep simplicity, inadvertently our representation may horrify our stakeholders but nevertheless be a powerful way of grabbing their attention.

It is always possible to avoid accidental facilitation that exposes unforeseen problems and ‘opens a can of worms’.

Projects become manageable when everyone knows that everyone knows exactly ‘what is going on’ and there is little room for private agendas, political games and other dishonest shenanigans.

Executives with high level responsibility for overall organisational effectiveness need not concern themselves with the organisational capability to facilitate collaborative projects successfully.