Questions

WHAT ARE YOU TRYING TO DO? It is one of the easiest questions to ask, and one of the most difficult to answer. It is a particularly difficult question for one who heads an institution where achievement results from other people’s efforts. It is much harder in a big place where the top person cannot see all that goes on. And if the head of a large institution wants to pull away from the pack and seek distinction, not just personally but for the institution, answering the questions becomes the most difficult of all.

Robert Greenleaf, Introduction to the essay “The Making of a Distinguished Institution” from the book The Private Writings of Robert K. Greenleaf.

Defining the goal of a project, or failure to do so, is what makes or breaks the success of what we try to do. Often times the goals of our projects seem to be to encourage failure.

At my work this past week, I met with two supervisors of a project who were interested in having the group I worked for assist them with a project. The work would revolve around conducting audits of communities to determine what actions they needed to take to maintain compliance with some particular environmental regulations. The supervisors discussed that they already knew that the communities were not in compliance with the rules, but that they needed to document this so that they could then pursue enforcement actions against a few of the communities so that the rest would then fall into line with the rules.

The ultimate goal of this project was to identify the communities failures so that some of them could be punished, which would scare the rest into compliance. This did not seem like a project destined for success. Instead of asking, “What can we do to find failure?” what we should have been asking is “What can we do to find success?”. The first question is one that will lead to failure; the second is the one that will lead to success. The fist questions is much easier to answer, the second much harder to ask.