Politics has
a bad name – so bad even politicians sneer at it. Pretty much every other day,
some leader of a national party dismisses the opposing position in the
healthcare debate as “politics.” Bad
stuff, he/she is saying. Dishonest and exploitive.
It’s almost
astounding to realize that politics once was considered a noble calling.
Nowadays, the polls rate this – dare we call it a “profession?” – incredibly
low in public esteem. Somewhere in that six-mile-deep Marianas
Trench in the Pacific Ocean . Lower than whale droppings.
It gets no respect. None.
So you’re up
against it when you remind everyone that politics is an essential function of
civilization, to say nothing of democracy. It is equally at the core of project
management. It is the art and science of accomplishing a mutually-valued
outcome among disparate parties.
The
unsatisfactory alternatives are dictatorship, war or surrender to unsolved
problems.
Project
managers actually have a much more favorable reputation than politicians – or
should that be “a much-less-unfavorable” reputation? (Did you hear the one
about the cannibals who lived happily within a large organization until they
were exposed? One of them carelessly ate a janitor instead of the customary
project manager. The janitor was missed instantly.)
In fact,
politics, like project management, can be practiced very well or very poorly.
Or somewhere in the vast range of quality between the extremes.
Similarly,
the issues of either profession can be vitally important. Healthcare, so
obscured by irrelevant and inane argument, really matters. People are dying
because they can’t afford care, and people are going broke trying to pay for
it. The country can’t continue to afford the way we’re going
This has been on the national
agenda, in one form or another, since at least the days of President Theodore
Roosevelt. We should all get our heads together and do something about it. You
don’t have to take one position or another to think that would be an important
thing to do.
It’s a project. A project within
the humongous, revolutionary project that is the United
States of America . And don’t believe there
isn’t plenty of risk in them both, particularly the survival of the way of life
we enjoy in this country.
At the end of the Constitutional Convention
in 1787, Benjamin Franklin referred to the newly-formed entity as “a republic,
if you can keep it.” He was not at all alone among the founding members in
understanding this thing needed careful tending. Thomas Jefferson famously
said, “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.”
It would have been too clumsy for Franklin
to have said, “It’s a project, if you can manage it.” Or Jefferson
to have warned, “Constant risk management is the price of democracy.”
The entire enterprise, at the time
of that years-long “project charter” negotiation, was politics of
the highest order. Washington
despaired of getting the battling factions to agree on anything – but he kept
it together through determination, persuasion and leadership. He was the ultimate
political project manager, and without him the whole thing would have come
apart.
In our infinitely smaller way, we
project managers need a sufficiency of the same characteristics to do our job.
It’s not all Gantt charts and work package specifications, however necessary
they are.
You don’t have to call it politics
if that offends you, but you’d better practice it that way if you’re going to
hold your stakeholders together and navigate the political challenges of your
projects.
