"It Can't Possibly Get Worse!" From projects to personal health to neighborhood chats over the fence, those five fateful words seem almost invariably to be harbingers of doom. No sooner does one utter them, than things DO get worse. A dry spell becomes a drought. A mole becomes a melanoma. A delay becomes a lawsuit. It's pretty darned grim! Yet somehow, by sharing those few words, we get the sense that we have set a limit on bad. For future reference, there's no limit. Things can always get worse.

Thanks, Carl. I feel much better about my life now.

Well, you should! Why? Because if we acknowledge that there are no boundaries on how far down a project can potentially go, it means that we have not hit bottom! We are not living the "worst-case scenario!" There is a worse case. And as such, we have extended the range of how much things can improve from where we are right now. Knowing the depths of negative possibilities means that we also have the opportunity to show how far above the bottom of this nigh-bottomless pit we are.

In having some work done in our yard, we found out that they'd have to dig a trench from the house 100 feet across the lawn. Can it get worse? Sure. They found a huge patch of poison ivy in the area where they're digging. Can it get worse? Bedrock. Can it get worse? I don't ask that question any more, because I know there's the possibility someone will answer "yes." Indeed, the contractor working the job shared the story of a client who had a native American archaeological find on the land where he wanted to put in a pond...er...water feature. The opportunity created by the find was enough to push back his intended project by almost a year. Why did he share this nightmare scenario with me? He did it to make me feel better. It CAN get worse...and to my good fortune, as yet, it has not.

Oddly enough, team members, family members, even folks on our own management teams tend to share information about their own worst-case scenarios. They outline the dark, nightmare scenarios, and we tend to see those scenarios as situations where they're trying to depress us. In fact, often, the reason they're sharing the information is both as a catharsis for their own pain, but also to make us feel better that our situations have not plumbed the same depths as theirs once did.

Think of the inverse. Ever run into the terminally cheery person? A bit out of season perhaps, but did you ever get the Christmas Card letter that details the virtually Olympic achievements of the family who sent it?

We have more things than you, we make more money than you, our children are prettier than yours, and we're living a nearly perfect life. Our world is perfect while you are mired in sludge. Happy Holidays!

Who makes you feel better about yourself? That person? Or the person who sends you the e-mail sharing a litany of their concerns and woes? Oddly enough, it's the latter, rather than the former. It's not a matter of schadenfreude (delight in the woe of others). Instead, it's that you feel like you can empathize more with the latter.

So how does this help us in our projects? It helps in a number of ways. First, it helps from a team perspective. Second it helps from a risk perspective. And third, it helps in establishing and adjusting management expectations.

TEAM PERSPECTIVE

From a team perspective, when team members want to share bad news, we should welcome it. First, it affords them the ability to identify problems that others may be able to help with, and second, it gives them the ability to clarify the limits of their capabilities in resolving some of those challenges and conflicts.

RISK PERSPECTIVE

By allowing and encouraging discussions on how much worse things could get, we afford team members to paint darker scenarios than currently exist. If we know this information, we can then assess the relative probability and impact and ensure that there's a common understanding of how much time and energy we really should devote to the worst-case scenarios.

MANAGEMENT PERSPECTIVE

From a management perspective, we need to take the opportunity to show management that there are depths that have not yet been plumbed, and that we are currently in a situation with plenty of room for improvement. The range of that "room for improvement" widens as things get worse. If we can get management to buy in to the improvement plans we develop, knowing the range that exists goes a long way toward a clearer, more effectively shared understanding of where the project is and may go.

The 1966 "beat" novel is titled Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me. That's not an altogether negative state of being. It can be if we dwell (personally and corporately) on the notions that being down means there's no hope of improvement. Or it can be construed in a completely different fashion. It can mean that we are now able to look positively upon the accomplishments of the past and hold them in higher esteem than we otherwise might have because we understand only in the darkness how bright they actually were!

Posted by Carl Pritchard on Wednesday, August 01, 2007

This article is copyright Pritchard Management Associates, Inc. 2007.  Members of the Silver Spring PMI Chapter are granted rights to reproduce in full for personal and professional use, but not for resale or commercial use.  All other rights reserved.