a work of fiction by Robin Reardon
FOREWORD
The only thing wrong with being gay is how some people treat you when they find out.
This blog entry is the sixth in a series of monthly installments that present the rationale behind Thinking Straight. The series is written from the point of view of a gay man—which I am not—so I'm labeling it as a fictional open letter to humanity, addressed to anyone who will read it and consider its points. My hope is that it will further understanding and acceptance.
The installments will be presented in logical order (Part I and the full list of installments was posted in April), and I encourage readers to start at the beginning and proceed through. The series will be highlighted each month on DREAMWalkergroup.com in the DREAMScene newsletter.
THE I-BEAM STRATEGY
So far I’ve spent a lot of time and used a lot of words to show that there are no rational reasons (is that redundant? if so, I think it was warranted, considering how much irrational, thoughtless blabber has been put forth by the homophobic world) to condemn or to fear gays or homosexuality. And, IMHO, I’ve accomplished a lot. But so far, only the condemnations that science, psychology, and – well, reason can destroy have been shredded. The most intractable condemnation is yet to come: religion.
I’m not against religion, per se. I’m just with The Reverend Lawrence Keene: “It’s okay to have a fifth grade understanding of God, as long as you’re in the fifth grade.”
But we can’t use reason alone to enhance a fifth grade understanding of God or religion. Religion is faith-based, not reason-based. We know this because even though a religion might insist on its absolute truth, it can’t prove that. And yet people believe it.
So just to get us started, let’s define.
A religion is a system of applying faith. It’s not faith itself, despite the fact that many people use the two terms as though they were the same. It would be tough to support a religion without faith (unless lip service is enough for you), but you can certainly have faith without religion. A religion is also a kind of blueprint for life. It’s based on identifiable doctrine, it establishes its own authority figures, and it contains rituals and, usually, dogma. The typical Judea-Christian religions all go on at great lengths about what you should and should not do to live the kind of life the God in question expects.
So a religion such as Christianity is a model for life.
I told you in the beginning that the model I’m going to show you is a kind of business model, but it’s also a life model. In fact, it’s an extremely useful life model. I put it together for the purposes of this discussion, but I have to say I’ve used it in many ways since then, to great success.
I’ve never seen anyone use it in the form I’m going to describe it here; I admit is simplistic, and on its own it wouldn’t do a project manager much good. But it really is the foundation of all project management disciplines that work. I’m going to apply it in a very creative way, if I do say so myself.
Here it is:
O B J E C T I V E
T
A
C
T
I
C
S
S I T U A T I O N
See? Really simple. I’ll bet you understand the relationships among the three components already. But let me go through it anyway. Humor me. You might be surprised. First, let’s define each component.
Objective is where you want to get to, or what you want to accomplish. It’s the reason you’re doing whatever it is you’re doing. It’s what must not fail. What happens if it fails? Kind of depends on what “it” is, but in all cases the goal, the dream, dies.
Situation (surprised that I didn’t go directly to tactics? Bear with me…) is where you are. It can also be what resources you have. It’s the place from which you’re going to take action in order to achieve your objective. This is where you make your plans. In Situation, you don’t take any action at all other than researching where you are or what you have to work with, and then making plans. If you don’t understand your situation well enough, especially in a complex project, you’re almost certainly going to fail.
Tactics are the actions you take—what you do and what you deliberately avoid doing, based on your situation, to accomplish your objective. The really interesting thing about Tactics is that they have to be firmly rooted in Situation. If a given tactic is not rooted, it’s going to be a waste of time and resources at best, or it’s going to jeopardize your objective at worst. The really puzzling thing about Tactics is how many people want to go there second. Right after Objective. Hell, a lot of people don’t even bother to understand Objective very thoroughly before they start applying tactics. That is, before they start doing things.
Now, if you’re normally-abled, getting out of bed in the morning as an objective will not require a whole lot of planning, and you probably won’t even think about it as an objective, let alone establish your situation or examine your tactics to see if they’re useful or dangerous. But what if you were quadriplegic? In that situation (that is, where you start from), achieving the objective of getting out of bed is more complex and will require some planning and some very specific tactics.
I know I told you I was going to apply this model creatively. I will, but we aren’t there yet. First I have to make sure that I’ve been really really really clear about how to use this model, because otherwise the chapters following it will be easy to misunderstand and even dismiss.
I’ll give you a couple of examples, and I’ll demonstrate how this model can be applied to a project or goal as situation moves through time, and how it can be applied to a single slice of time.
Office Tower: Situation changing over time
You’re going to build an office tower. You’re a business person, not an architect or the owner of a construction company. You’re more like Donald Trump, only not quite as wealthy. And with better hair.
What’s your objective? Do I hear some people say “Build an office tower”? If you said that, you’re actually describing a tactic, not a goal. Because why are you going to build this tower? What will you do with it when it’s done? You’re going to lease out office space, right? So what you really want is to spend less money on your tower than you expect to receive through these leases over some period of time that you deem a good return.
So what’s your Objective? That’s right; making money. (It might also be to win Daddy’s approval at long last, or prove to your big brother that you’re cleverer than he is, but those goals are beyond my capacity to help you plan for.) If you forget that your objective is making money, if you lose sight of this goal and get distracted by how pretty the thing will be or how great it will feel to see your name so near the clouds, you could easily make some very foolish decisions about how to proceed each time the situation changes. Because guess what. The situation will change. It always does. Shift happens.
We’re ready to talk about Situation now, because we’re clear on our Objective: making money. How do we know we’re clear? Because trying to answer the question “Why?” isn’t bringing any more clarity. You may have your own personal reasons for making money, but again they’re personal and not something we’ll address here. For most people, making money is enough of an objective.
So first, what’s your situation today? Do you already own the real estate you want to build on? If you have to lease the land, have you figured enough expense into your financial plans to build your tower where it will bring in as much lease money as possible as quickly as possible? (Remember your objective.) Is there a building of any sort already on it? Will it need to be totally demolished, or can you use anything on the site?
Do you have storage facilities where you can keep materials for the construction, or will you need to rent space, and can you afford to do that? Or will you rely on just-in-time delivery, which can be risky? Whichever it is, plan accordingly.
Will you use union workers or hire people who will work for less but may have less experience and who may not speak English well enough for communication to be easy? Union workers (who also sometimes don’t speak English as a first language) are more expensive and may strike; non-union workers present different potential risks, like having unions picket you. Whichever it is, plan accordingly.
Will your contractor have access to enough heavy equipment to replace something quickly if it breaks down? Available redundant equipment will increase your cost, but there’s a risk to the lower cost; if some critical piece of equipment breaks down and takes time to fix, your entire schedule could be affected. What’s the result? A negative impact on your cash flow. What’s your objective?
Will you hire a known architect whose work is proven or a newby architect, partly because she’ll be cheaper and partly because you want to give her an opportunity? What’s the risk worth to you?
All this, and lots more, must be asked and answered and planned for before you take step one. That is, before you perform even one of your tactics. Because how will you know which tactics to do first if you don’t have a solid plan?
When you’ve planned as well as you can, knowing the kinds of hazards a project like this could entail, you need to think about what could happen over time. Like the possibility of a union strike. Or of a weather disaster, depending on what city you’re in. Earthquake? Hurricane? Tornado? Ice storm? You can’t predict, but you can anticipate. Shift happens. But no matter how thorough you are, you know there will be things you can’t plan for. Only when you’ve done all the planning and anticipating you can do will you begin the Tactics portion of your project. But keep in mind that over time, as the situation changes, you’ll have to change your tactics. Shift happens. That’s not an echo.
So. Tactics. Now’s the time you hire the architect, and make arrangements for materials storage, and clear the land. Here’s where you put one foot in front of the other, shift your weight, put the back foot in front of you, shift weight again, and move forward.
Time passes. You’ve hired union workers. There’s a strike involving electricians. What changed? Situation. What might have to change next? Plan, and tactics. You might decide to wait out the strike, but that’s money lost on everyone else you either have to keep paying or let go. If the strike begins to look intractable, you could decide to hire non-union workers. Be prepared for demonstrations, possible vandalism, violence. This is a change in tactics. And what brought it about? Did the objective change? No, not unless it has failed. What brought about a change in tactics was a change in situation.
If you don’t change your tactics to accommodate changes in situation, you could get into financial trouble. What will that mean for your objective? What’s your objective?
Serengeti Plain: Different situations, same slice of time
We’re on the Serengeti. It’s a rugged place for the animal inhabitants—in some cases kill or be killed, in others run or be eaten. So the objective for all of these animals is the same: survival. It would take too long to examine the situations of all these creatures, so I’ll select two with a basic difference in their respective situations.
On one hand, we have the lioness. What’s her objective? Survival.
What’s her situation? She lives on the Serengeti, she has access to food and water most of the time, she must sleep, she feels compelled to help maintain the pride so she’ll have to submit from time to time to the attentions of that mangy thing who seldom hunts for himself, and once he’s had his way she has cubs to care for, but this is necessary for the survival of her species, so she’ll have to do it.
What are her tactics? She submits to the mangy thing, she bears and raises her cubs, she scouts out watering holes and moves with the water in dry times if necessary, she drinks, she eats, and she does all the other biological necessities of life that we don’t need to go into in detail. The most basic thing she does is eat. She eats to survive. Survival makes all the other things possible. (Interestingly, it’s also her objective.) And to get food, she hunts. That’s a tactic based on her situation (a carnivore on the Serengeti Plain), and it supports her objective.
On the other hand we have a Thompson’s gazelle. What’s his objective? Survival. What’s his situation? He actually has a lot in common with the lioness, and with a few exceptions (like submitting to the mangy thing) their tactics are also the same. However, the most important tactic, eating, is performed in a different way. If the gazelle were to chase the lioness, what would happen to his objective? In fact, in order to support his objective of survival, he has a tactic that trumps eating: running.
For both these animals, the objective is the same; the situation is the same in many places but different in a few critical ones; and wherever the situations are different, the tactics must be correspondingly different.
I want to be very clear about something before going on, so I’m going to say it again: a Tactic that is not firmly grounded in Situation will not support Objective. For any given objective, situation almost always changes (shift happens). When situation changes, the tactics that depended on the changed aspects of the situation must be revisited and, probably, changed.
Clear?
Next time, we’re moving on to the biggest Card of them all. I all it the God card, but what it really says on it is “DAMNED.”
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