It Broke In Front Of Him

Every project plan I have ever built marks the leaving. Launch date, go-live, GA, general availability, a phrase that sounds like a weather condition. Little flags jammed into a calendar at every spot where something finally exits the building. Not one of those plans has ever had a flag for the making.

The making is where the entire thing actually happens, and we schedule it like commute time.

This year I gave myself a list of new experiences/hobbies and a long with each theme: Make something, sell something, read something, write something, give something. Five verbs, twelve months, one man badly overestimating his hands. The making turned into a woodworking class, and I want to be honest about the woodworking experience: I did not enjoy it. A lathe is loud and indifferent and it holds strong opinions about your technique that it communicates entirely through vibration.

I brought a friend. He was not helping. He was sharing advice from his experience though.

My bowl broke. Cracked clean through the wall of it, late, at the exact moment it had started to look like a bowl instead of a threat. (And hours of hand-carving later…)

I texted my buddy after it happened.

That is the whole thing. He did not fix it. He had no technique to hand me. We looked at the two pieces together and the failure stopped being a verdict on me and turned into something that happened in a room with two looking at the remnants. Alone, I throw the pieces out. Alone, I tell a shorter version of that story later, the version where I simply failed.

The rest of the list ran the same way, quieter. My girls built a storyboard on the kitchen table and I shot the film on my phone, which made me the crew. We wrote poems as a family, which sounds unbearable on paper and was not. Every activity that stuck to me had somebody else’s fingerprints on it. The ones I did alone got completed.

There is a real difference between completed and kept.

Notice what none of our milestones cover. We mark the handoff, the release, the QBR, the moment work becomes somebody else’s problem. We have no marker anywhere for two people inside the same unfinished thing with nothing expected to come out the other side, and that is the part that makes anyone want to show up again tomorrow.

So put one on the plan. That’s the lesson.

Not an offsite, not a team-building exercise with a facilitator and a whiteboard the color of a hospital hallway. A date on the real plan, in the same font as the launch date, where a few of you make something together and no deliverable is owed to anybody. The font is how people learn what counts.

This is a positioning problem before it is a culture problem. What a company chooses to measure is a public statement about where it believes value comes from, and a plan carrying eleven shipping milestones and zero making milestones is announcing in writing that value arrives at the door and never at the bench. Your team reads that. Actually, they read it considerably faster than they read the mission statement…

We have gotten very good at marking the moment a thing is finally out of our hands. The thing worth marking is earlier, messier, and has two people leaning over it. Nobody remembers the launch date. Somebody remembers the crack, the emotional weight of it, and the appreciation for the craft we put ourselves into refining…

Stay Positive & Send An Invite