Project Documentation as Incantational Magic

Last night, my wife and I were commiserating about writing out project documentation following fixed templates. There are all of these headings, and it feels like the only reason you have to write down something under each heading is so that some project auditor can work their audit trail and check off on their little checklist that each section was filled out. It seems to be form without function. There is so much repetition involved, so much stuff that makes you want to write:"see scetion "C", above")... plus stuff you just make up in order to fill the gap. It is easy to feel like this kind of writing is futile.

However, this morning on the bus ride in, I was reading an "Impact Assessment" document I had written late last year for a training program I am developing. It was one of those department-mandated documents with lots of mandatory headings, and when I was writing it, I felt all the frustrations I referred to above. It felt like a repetitive, persnickey, process-heavy and unnecessarily long production.

Reading it again a few months later was an interesting experience. I realized *so* much all of a sudden.

First of all, reading it as I did - I have my mind full of other pre-occupations, I haven't thought about this in awhile, I only have a brief time to look at it and I am thinking of other things I have to do soon... I began to realize how important that repetition is for slowly easing the attention of the reader to the main points. You can lay all of the main points out once, but the reader's mind is fragmented by other preoccupations, so they barely skim it and get it in the first time. But then, as they read on, section after section, as the message is re-framed and re-delivered, with slight variations that highlight different aspects of it, with consistency that builds over time... it starts to sink in. The consistency and rhythm become soothing. It calms your busy mind and softens you up to receive the message.

It's like music. The reason it isn't just a quick memo is because it isn't supposed to work like communication, it's supposed to work like music - to lull and immerse readers in the idea, and to support their own imaginations as they get into the emotional and physical world of the idea (or in other words, to make them fully present to the idea).

Suddenly, the repetitive structure of the document made perfect sense. Classical music - all classical musics - modern and old, across cultures - are all about themes and variations. So is jazz, so are folk musics... but think about Philip Glass for a moment - there's that recognizable theme, repeating, with slight variations in the instrumentation, slight overlaps of the themes, minor chromatic shifts, but each repetition of the theme pulls you in and through the piece, and into this attentive frame of mind where the experience of the piece becomes increasingly vivid and real to you.

*That's* the kind of composition those repetitive documents are like. To us, when we are writing them, the repetition seems pointless because we already stated the point once, and we don't understand why we have to do so again. But for a preoccupied mind - one who picks up the document to resurrect an awareness of the project but who has not thought about it at all for awhile prior to picking up the document - the first statement of the theme is barely heard through their mental clutter, but by slightly varying and restating the theme in section after section - slowly they get lulled into the state of mind that at some point - probably a different point for each reader - the project inhabits their mind fully, and they inhabit the project mind.

At that point they may set the document aside, and not finish it, and miss some important detail that was in the document, but that they ask you about, even if it was written there, and they did not take the time to read it all the way. That is not stupid or an insult, if you know why those kinds of documents exist - which is that they are musical compositions that get everybody attuned to the mental model of the project.

Repetitive documents also serve a double-function as reference material, so that people who need to look up some specific fact needs to be able to find it under some specific heading that is easy to find, so again, the fact that you kind of echo the overall theme (with variations) under each heading is part of the magic of these documents - so that even though they are hunting out some specific detail, there is enough of the main "tune" there to revive their awareness of the overall picture.

This seems so pointless when we are writing, and the awareness of the theme is total for us, but reading it months later while multi-tasking, it is *such* a usable document format!!

And you know what, I recently had a meeting about this training program with my manager, and she and I did not read the impact assessment document beforehand. As a result, we re-invented a lot of what had already been written in the document. I realized, while reading the older document on the bus this morning, that this was okay.

Part of enculturating a team of people with an imaginary world (a future project is a state we are imagining, and we want to make it true, but nonetheless we are doing the same thing storytellers are doing on some level), is repeating and restaging the core messages. So you can do so beautifully once in a clear document that everybody loves, and everybody praises that document, but then the fragmented multi-tasking nature of the organization means that their awareness and "fusion" with that imaginary world subsides. Later, in another event, you may do something else, including brainstorming anew as if the first document had never been written. This is not a way of invalidating or disrespecting the first document, and it is not stupid. It is smart. Part of your job as a communicator around projects is to restage the invocation of the product vision many times. It may give rise to multiple restatements of similar ideas, but these are just recordings of your various performances. They should all be good, and as a professional, you should know that your job is to perform the same high-valued tunes repeatedly.

Your job in invoking the reality of an invisible, imaginary world over and over until it is made real for people is a lot like the role of a priest or a shaman. The believers all know the core messages you bring up as you perform for them, but to keep that vision alive against the onslaught of everyday life, they need you to bring down the magic over and over again, in ways that keep them on track. Don't expect it to follow the logic of reason, because that is not what you are being asked to do. Your task has the logic of magic, not reason. You are successful if your produce many different artifacts (documents, presentations, minutes, emails, phone calls), and each one repeats goals visions and key points in a gently supportive and evocative way, with infinite patience, because each time you do that is another successful instance of you making this invisible world real for people - in their minds - so that they are then empowered to make it real for real - in reality - an executed project.

Given the normal chaos of organizational life, not everyone will access all the right documents, or not in the right order, and those who do may be so busy that key points are driven out of their mind, or they may not access the documents frequently enough, or have missed updates, etc. This is normal, and part of your job in working the magic is to use repetition, theme and variations across all of your productions so that no matter where they hook up to your project, they can start to hum along with the rest of the crew.

One of the universal structures of human folk musics and even animal communications is the "call-response" structure. In this kind of song, a song leader calls out a phrase, and a chorus of listeners repeats the call. Performers in live concert often start up call-response sequences with their audience, jazz musicians improvise by having one instrument throw out leads while the ensemble responses, soldiers do call-response chants while marching, cheerleading squads use them... some cultures have very rich call response folk music traditions.

Each point of communication is like a call, and you know that it is hard to participate in a call-response song if you don't really know the song. Performers who try call-response sequences in concert often fall flat because the audience doesn't know the words of the song well enough. So your role is to put out calls that enable the chorus to respond because you awaken enough of the whole song in their mind for them to participate. Each communicative fragment is like another call, and it's okay that some of them are repetitive. Call-response games are supposed to be repetitive - that's what makes the format possible.

"The Lord is my shepherd" - think about that idea in the context of organizational life. People are like sheep darting off in all directions while the project dictates they all need to get their heads up and move off for a long journey in one sustained direction. Your job as a priest/representative of the imaginary goal world is to herd those sheep and get them all moving. Each section of a repetitive document, and each repetitive document in a project, and each redundant meeting - is actually a border collie, and you need to deploy several of them around the herd of sheep to enable the herd to move.

So the fact that you have to deploy more than one collie is good, normal and to be expected. As a skilled shepherd, your job is actually to bring forward and deploy multiple border collies, so make sure each collie has a full enough set of the information for the project that it can do its job. One key/dominant sheep may not see your brown collie, only your black one, so every collie has to be a repetition of enough of the overall theme to keep all sheep oriented to the correct direction.

It's a different way of understanding your work. It changes perceptions. Things that seem like organizational/bureaucratic irrationality turn into understandable human dynamics of making the imaginary real. This is how humans normally make the imaginary real - themes, variations, repetition, multiple instances, multiple reminders, multiple re-enactments... that's how a pastor thinks of his or her job list for the year, and that's how a business analyst should think about her role as well - this is part of the magic of the role.

The recursive nature of it is not a useless waste of effort to be resisted - it's the performance. A musician has to practice a piece of music thousands of times and perform it live thousands of times and produce recordings that are played millions of times in order to create a timeless classic. That's the art form. That's what it is. That's what you have to be good at! That's the value you bring to the organization. That's what they count on you for.

Repetitions of project themes aren't wasted reminders to people who can't keep things straight, they are incantations - each one helps bring the imaginary world into real life. If you lovingly and patiently repeat those incantations when people turn to you, relying on you to work your magic once more and bring the invisible world into mental life for them, then you will be succeeding at your task. If you bristle with resentment because you thought you already sent them that message so that now if they don't know what you sent them, they are disrespecting you and your prior investment of time and energy, you are missing the point and misunderstanding your role.

You yourself, if you were taken off your own project, not given time to read the document for a year, and then were brought back to lead the project, would appreciate someone kindly re-invoking the mental model of the project for you in your mind - you would need that, and if someone could do it artfully without making you read your own prior document, in a way that repeated the key themes with subtle variations that were aimed at what you need to know right now, this very minute, you would appreciate their incantation - their magic words of resurrecting the reality of the project to your mind.

So that's your profession. You're a project magician! And your spells are musical compositions that lull people into alternate (achievable!) realities in the world of imagination. The more you succeed at re-invoking those visions into life in peoples' minds over and over again, the better your team will be at making them real, hitting their targets, and enjoying success.

When you Hate the Job you Always Wanted

Okay, I finally found that article I was looking for in the first ever post to this blog. It's Effort for Payment: A Tale of Two Markets by James Heyman and Dan Ariely, in Psychological Science Volume 15—Number 11: 787-793. They wanted to see how compensation effected the effort people put into a task. Standard economic wisdom suggests that they more you pay them, the better they will perform. This is not borne out empirically. In their words:

A long history of research has demonstrated that rewards can decrease motivation and attitudes (Festinger & Carlsmith, 1959), alter self-perception (Bem, 1965), increase overjustification (Lepper et al., 1973), and turn feelings of competence into feelings of being controlled (Deci & Ryan, 1985). The debate over these findings (Eisenberger & Cameron, 1996; Ryan & Deci, 2000) has generally shifted to the question of what specific circumstances give rise to these counterintuitive effects.

Their proposal is that there are two kinds of markets: monetary markets and social markets. Different kinds of goods and services may be associated with each market, but more to the point, the form of compensation offered differs as well. When you offer to pay someone, you signal that you want to situate the transaction in the economic modality. If you offer to pay friends for helping you move apartments, they may get royally and truly offended! However, stocking your new fridge full of beer and ordering in pizzas will be gladly accepted - unless you mention the price! If you do that, you are trying to put a money-value on the asset of having friends who will help you. You will, in a sense, be rejecting them from the social market, driven by reciprocal altruism, esteem, social standing/reputation, social network position, and all the rest.

They continue:

[This h]ypothesis...1 also predicts a distinction between exchanges in which payment is not mentioned (‘‘not paying at all’’) and those in which individuals are told explicitly that they will not be paid (‘‘paying nothing’’). Whereas not mentioning payment is likely to cause individuals to consider themselves to be in a social-market relationship, telling individuals explicitly that they are not getting paid is likely to cause them to consider themselves to be in a money-market relationship. Our framework predicts that not paying at all in the context of social market relationships can create higher levels of incentives than low levels of compensation in the context of money-market relationships, a prediction that is shared by many other accounts (Bem, 1965; Deci, Koestner, & Ryan, 1999; Festinger, 1957; Gneezy & Rustichini, 2000b; Lepper, Greene, & Nisbett, 1973).

This means, they point out, that "Effort in exchange for no payment can be higher than effort in exchange for low monetary payment." Strictly economic rationality would not predict this, but strictly economic rationality has been slow to pick up on the impact of social exchange behavior on economic exchange behavior. I remember when I was in Fiji for awhile, and in some of the marketplaces where native Fijian businesses were predominant, there were signs all over the place telling vendors not to sell good on verbal credit! (I.e., a vague promise to repay the vendor later, somehow.) In the traditional Fijian village economy, the social exchange market dominates material exchange, and so a lot of the culture gives expression to social exchange values. In a modern cash economy, however, people had to learn to insist that business be business, and that payment be made.

I think some of us are biologically more sensitive to different kinds of signals of gain or loss. I for one basically don't notice money, don't think of it, would rather not think of it, etc. I care what my salary is, but mainly as an indicator of social status, and of how valuable my employer considers me as a resource. I love doing a good job, though. I love the recognition that comes from it, but I would far rather professionalize my work. I prefer to make my salary a background indicator of my social standing and status, and to then ignore it. When I do good work, I want it to be for intrinsic reasons - because I value good work, and because I have a will to constantly improve things, etc. I want to present my work to others, to discuss it with them, to gain recognition and to thereby gain social sanction to continue my apparently valuable work. However, getting paid for every product I deliver is profoundly de-motivating. I'd almost rather not work at all.

Weird but true.

When Pay Ruins Everything

Virgin post... what a feeling of freedom, and irrelevance! Do the two go together, I wonder? Are the relevant always burdened?

Blogging is great! I don't know why I didn't think of this before. You see, I suffer from an illness. You might have it too! Basically, my problem is my attitude towards work. My work is important to me. I like working and I like producing good output. I want to exercise my talents, and I have various kinds of writing contracts on the go that let me do just that. Those projects are actually really quite interesting - producing texts and documents that seem like fun to put together.

However...

As soon as I do this thing I enjoy (writing) for money, the project takes on all the appeal of calculating my income taxes. I just can't get motivated to do it! Rather than doing that writing task I have agreed to do for money, I goof off, doing other writing tasks (like blogging) that I feel more like doing, just for fun.

Getting paid for something you love can totally ruin the experience.

I am vaguely aware that there are many ways of understanding this phenomenon. Many different investigators believe that humans have more than one motivational system, and these systems may compete in various ways.

One of these distinctions is prominent in social exchange theory (SEC). SEC distinguishes between social exchange and economic exchange. Social exchanges ares based on trust, mutual aid, the joint production of public goods, social networking and social standing. Economic exchanges are based on contracts and on the profit principle. It may be the case that some of us are much more plugged in to the social motivational system than the economic one. Sexual selection may have had a role in shaping that social motivational system, making it more developed than it might otherwise have become... Googling "social exchange theory" opens the door to this little world.

Other people define two motivational systems differently, e.g. a "hot" (emotional) and "cool" (instrumental/rational) system, or an "approach" system and a "withdraw" system. People for whom money ruins the pleasures of work may be more hot/approach types, rather than cool/withdraw types. We may have an insufficient fear of poverty, perhaps. Or perhaps the systems overlap each other differently - we don't get hot for instrumental gains, but rather for social status and networking gains, or something.

Of course, a venerable distinction in the world of motivational studies is the intrinsic/extrinsic distinction. Some of us may be so strong on the intrinsic motivation (e.g. high task-involvement and high control over our work) that extrinsic incentives actually ruin our motivation. In that case, managing people like us would involve surrounding us with the type of work we want to do anyway (which happens to be what our employers also want), and giving us enough money to feel important and respected (but not have that money connected to any specific task or project). Salary would be better than piecework, perhaps, for workers like us. Then we would need a social environment where we could distinguish ourselves, winning all of those social rewards (prominence, eminence, status, respect... etc.) which are the real things that motivate us...

This is exactly how the university system works, come to think of it! (Also possibly the entire country of France.)

It would be interesting to try to design or imagine a university-like company. Genetech apparently works this way: Employees don't get assignments, they get "appointments." ...Genentech awards sabbaticals to stave off burnout. To keep creativity alive, both it and Google encourage their scientists and engineers to spend fully 20% of each workweek pursuing pet projects.

Of course, blogging is pursuing a pet project, but for now I pursue it under the cloud of guilt. The shame, the shame...

I guess it's time to get back to work.