Customer Reviews

The Blind Men and the Elephant: Mastering Project Work

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I've got quite a shelf of books on project management, some excellent, some not so good, but nearly all centering on the mechanics of planning, organizing, and controlling a project effort. What's been lacking is a good view of projects as a human activity--which is kind of strange, since every project I've ever seen has been carried out by human beings.

David Schmaltz's book, "The Blind Men and the Elephant," is a welcome addition to the project management literature. It won't teach you how to draw a PERT chart, or use Microsoft Project, or construct a formal work breakdown and budget. What it will do is give you some invaluable tools for thinking about projects and the people who do them--including yourself.

Schmaltz uses John Godfrey Saxe's classic poem about the blind men who perceive an elephant (depending on which part they touch) as a wall, a spear, a snake, a tree, a fan and a rope to illustrate lessons about human beings in project situations--lessons ranging from the only form of real motivation (what do you really want from your participation in this project?) to the nurturing of communities that truly cooperate and support each other in carrying out a project. The style is personal, idiosyncratic and quirky, in the best sense of the words--the lessons are presented and illustrated with personal stories that are a delight to read even if you're not trying to manage a project at the moment.

"The Blind Men and the Elephant" is not a replacement for a good textbook on organizing and managing the mechanics of a project; it's something far harder to find--an essential addition to the shelf of any project manager who might someday have to deal with human beings.

Here's a new way to look at complex development work:

Your project is an invisible elephant. It's standing in a room, waiting to be revealed by a group of groping teammates.

Like the six blind men from Indostan in John Godfrey Saxe's famous poem, "The Blind Men and the Elephant," we encounter pieces of projects, rarely the whole elephant. We grasp whatever we can -- an ear, a tail, a trunk, a leg, a tusk, a broad, flat side.

Based on what we grasp -- our piece of the project -- we extrapolate an understanding of the whole: a fan, a rope, a snake, a tree, a spear, a wall.

Author David A. Schmaltz, in his book named after the poem, develops these analogies in terms of project experience.

We encounter a fan that brings us fresh air, a rope that binds us together, a snake that abuses our trust, a tree that evolves in structure above and beneath the surface, a spear that puts us on the defensive, a wall that challenges our personal progress. A chapter is devoted to each analogy.

This isn't a storybook, though. These simple metaphors are touchstones for Schmaltz's broad exploration of what makes projects meaningful. Schmaltz sheds light on the dark matter of project management -- the stuff that blocks us from succeeding on projects as individuals and as teams. He even leads us through the panicked self-talk that runs through a manager's head at the start of a project.

With rich writing that's rare in management books, Schmaltz gives us a 360 view of project management itself -- project management is this book's invisible elephant. The elephant emerges.

You won't find any worksheets, diagrams, flow charts, procedures, instructions, or textbook problems in this book. Schmaltz gives us something more valuable and memorable: fresh ways to think about how we approach and manage projects.

For example, managers should encourage each person to find a personal project within each project, something personally "juicy" to sustain interest and make the effort valuable. Going beyond the stated objectives of a project, each of us needs to ask ourselves, "What do you want?" -- and to keep asking that until our personal goals emerge. These goals don't compete with the team's purpose -- they bind us to the project's success. This is the process of what Schmaltz calls "finding your wall."

Just as managers should encourage this kind of buy-in rather than trying to externally motivate a team, managers should not impose a prefabricated structure onto a team. Schmaltz argues that when people find a personally juicy goal within a project, they will strive to structure their efforts in an efficient, organic manner -- without taking that twenty-volume project methodology off the shelf.

On a person-to-person level, Schmaltz asserts that despite the risk of getting cheated by snake-like deceivers, project members are most wise to interpret people's actions generously, assuming the best and freely offering trust and help. Using the results of a computer programming competition in which the Prisoner's Dilemma was solved by having the imprisoned conspirators refuse to implicate each other, Schmaltz shows that offering trust as a first principle can lead to bigger win-wins, more often.

Schmaltz consults through his firm, True North project guidance strategies, based in Walla Walla, Washington (see http://www.projectcommunity.com). He hosts the Heretic's Forum at http://pc.wiki.net, a Web space designed to "capture dangerously sane ideas." In addition to his periodic newsletter, Compass, he has published one previous book, This Isn't a Cookbook.

That invisible elephant, the powerful analogy at the center of this book, will enrich the way you approach new projects and reconsider problems -- especially the parts of problems that remain invisible to you on current projects. As Schmaltz wishes in a sort of benediction, "May this elephant emerge whenever you engage."

This is a book you have to read, by this I mean it is both an important text that should be read and a book you can not dip-into or skim. You have to read it carefully to absorb the concepts that build upon each other to provide great insights into how projects actually work. The descriptions are rich and complex but because the book is small (under 130 pages) it never feels overwhelming and the topics are well covered but not repeated or over stated.

Recognition is growing around the fact that successful projects are more about people, collaboration and communications than creating plans and following processes. The success and growth of agile methodologies in software development is testimony to this shift in priorities and through this book, David Schmaltz explains why this is the case and offers suggestions for improving project outcomes.

The clever use of the "Blind Men" poem ties the main concepts of the book together in an engaging manner and provides an uncomfortably apt analogy for many of the classic project management struggles. This book provides valuable guidance for project managers and highlights the key areas to focus on to achieve better project outcomes.

This quick, well-written, and thought provoking book addresses the human dimension of project work too often lost behind GANTT charts, change controls, and scheduling tools. Schmaltz serves up uncomfortable realities about the world of project work. By confronting us with our Master/Slave frame of reference, he helps us understand how we unwittingly enslave ourselves to our Masters and how we can free ourselves with no one else's permission. Schmaltz reveals what great project managers have known forever about making their projects really work well -- clarity of purpose and strength of relationship are essential, and the responsibility and power to achieve those essential elements lie in each individual's hands. As he says in the preface, if you want a book to tell you what to do and how to make your projects turn out perfectly, take a pass. If you want a book with a bulleted list of how-to's, keep looking. If you are interested in shifting your perspective on your projects and learning how to approach them in a way that leaves you the master of your own experience, this book is for you.

This book is the merging of the "finding meaningful work" movement and the nuts and bolts of the workplace. As a former engineer, having worked on many projects, I can appreciate this new perspective of finding a project within a project. How many times have we been on projects where our hearts and souls were someplace else?

Schmaltz has found a way to bring the spiritual domain into the technical domain--through project work. He shows that the work is not just a series of tasks and fire drills, but rather part of each person's journey in answering the question, "What do you want?" His ideas on using projects to do this puts the topic squarely in the heart of the workplace.

There are other powerful themes that Schmaltz brings out--how community is part of our own hunger and nature, the power of not knowing,and the limitations that we impose on ourselves through our beliefs and mental models. All this, and more, comes out clearly with real-life stories that the reader can resonate with. "The Blind Men and the Elephant" will awaken you to the illusion that each of us has succumbed to in our workplaces and turn the illusion into purposeful living.

If you've ever owned an animal, you know what it's like to have expectations that don't match "reality"--there's what "the book" says about how your animal should behave, and then there's what it actually does. So it seems fitting that Schmaltz should use an animal--an elephant, to be precise--as a metaphor for a project, and then weave a lovely, poetic whole about the "behavior" of projects that contains more actual truths than other books with lots of charts, graphs and examples designed to make you an expert, of sorts, on the subject.

If you've never actually managed a project, this book might seem confusing to you. If you only manage projects that deal with "stuff" (construction projects, for example), the metaphors might not seem as apt. But if you manage projects that engineer large systems out of computer equipment and "thin air," then you will feel right at home with this meander through the shifting landscape of projects of this type.

In fact, you will be amazed that someone else has observed the same things you have--that these types of projects do not seem to be reliably predictable, no matter how much effort we put into making them "behave!" Schmaltz does what only a master can do: Identifies the patterns hidden within the unpredictability, and presents them in a way which evokes a sense of familiarity in the reader. I had many déjà vu, been-there-done-that, and wow-that-happened-to-someone-else-too experiences reading this book.

In so many ways, one of the great values of this book to me was simply in confirming my experiences. It's not me, I can finally say, and it's not even the projects, that lead to deviations from expectation. It's actually the nature of our expectations themselves regarding the inherent manageability of projects that is at issue. I need to get past the idea that there is a definitive "book" or "method" to go by, and get on with making projects actually work! Schmaltz' offering went a long way toward preparing me to do that.

The chapter on motivation ("Can a project leader fan the embers of commitment into a dedicated, high-performance flame?") alone made the book worth reading for me. I also very much appreciated his treatment of "generosity" in the interpretation of events ("The most generous possible interpretation transforms difference from definition into information.") Schmaltz' concepts have real-life applications; I will never look at projects in the same way again after reading this book.

I recommend a companion purchase: "Taming Wicked Projects," an audiobook by Amy Schwab, Schmaltz' business partner and wife. Schwab elaborates in this CD on many of the topics and metaphors presented in The Blind Men and the Elephant (so I suggest reading the book first), and extends and adds to them with her own considerable experience in the field. I do hope you get as much out of these works as I did.

"The Blind Men and the Elephant" is a small book (130 pages) which covers the relationship or human side of project management. The book is structured around the poem about the blind men touching the elephant. Each interpretation of the blind men is used as a metaphor for a chapter in the book (thus 6 chapters plus a start and end chapter). Each chapter consists of stories from the author relating to one concept of project communities that he feels is important.

I enjoyed the first few chapters of the book a lot. The critical tone the author had against traditional project management practices, comparisons to scientific management and the master/slave relationships. That actually made me feel uncomfortable since I felt the master/slave words were too strong, but this was probably the intention of the author. The stories in the book are based on the authors personal experiences, they are funny and well written.

The second part of the book was still good, but ... somehow I started to doze off more quickly. Some of the stories were less powerful and some where just plain boring (like the wandering of the project managers mind when making the plan -- story). The content was still valid, the writing was still funny, but ... it wasn't as powerful as the early chapters.

What is covered in the chapters? Topics such as finding your own meaning within a project, doing planning together, trusting people first, building your own organization, being careful with metaphors and finally building coherence and purpose into a project. Also traditional project management assumptions such as control and focus on the plans are criticized.

When I started reading the book, I was positively surprised and thought that this was one of the best books I had read for some while. As I got further in the book, I got slightly disappointed. It was still good, but it didn't continue the promise I felt in the beginning. Also, reflecting afterwards, I don't think the book contained much new things (though, the author already said that in the beginning... ). Thus, I ended up with four instead of five stars. This book is still highly recommended though!

I don't want to detract from what others got from reading this book. Judging from the other reviews, it was obviously well-received by many. However, I found this book to be almost incomprehensible and pointless. The author rambles around from meaningless subject to meaningless subject, all propped up by a cute but clever theme of blind men and an elephant. I finished the book and went off scratching my head as to what I'd learned. Perhaps I'm too left-brained. I loaned it to someone else and they brought the book back half-read and said they thought the author needed counseling.

Using the parable of "The Blind men and the Elephant" - a poem by 19th century poet John Godfrey Saxe - author David Schmaltz illuminates the nature of project work and the barriers inherent in it.
Schamltz explores the unique, and sometimes conflicting, perspectives and perceptions that every team member brings to a project. These can be obstacles to finding the "quick solution," but they can also be the basis for each individual to make the work personally meaningful.
"We are each a marvel of adaptive ability," he says, "but we hobble ourselves whenever we unconsciously adopt inappropriately limiting frames of reference."
With wit and engaging story-telling, Schmaltz presents a convincing argument that personal purpose still matters. Finding that purpose forms the basis for "the project within the project" for each of us.