In our daily lives we are presented with many opportunities to multi-task. We expect this of ourselves, as we try to produce as much as we can – both professionally and personally – in the average day. But how effective are we – really – at doing this? In a fabulous book called Your Brain At Work, David Rock addresses how our brains are wired, and how we can best use our brains to the greatest extent in the workplace. Where does multi-tasking fit in? For the most part we stink at multi-tasking and ought to use multi-tasking very selectively. In his book, Rock discusses how amazingly ineffective we are when we try to multi-task. We simply shouldn’t do it, except in certain well understood circumstances.

The Mindavation team have long referred to this as the 98/2 attention span. We may be sitting in a meeting or “listening in” on a conference call while having a side discussion, or answering emails on our smartphone. Are we multi-tasking in this instance? Well, yes, we are, kind of. Are we actually paying attention to two things at once? Hardly. You’ve seen it and experienced it – someone is in a meeting pecking away on their smartphone and someone poses a question to them. No response. Someone then calls out their name, and suddenly, they are attentive and participating in the meeting once again, putting down the smartphone! This embarrassed person was genuinely multi-tasking, but that doesn’t mean they were effectively PARTICIPATING in two things at once. 98% of their attention was diverted to the smartphone email, and 2% (maybe) was still in the meeting – enough to respond when their name was called, but not enough to know a question was posed to them. Had this person truly been multi-tasking, it would have been obvious that the meeting question was directed toward them and no calling out of their name would have been necessary.

We constantly fool ourselves into thinking we are multi-tasking. We just aren’t effective at performing two things at once. We are working on one thing and “presently interruptable” for another – lending 2% of our focus on the lesser activity. Next time a task or meeting or conference call requires 2% of your attention, go for it and multi-task. However, if you need more than 2% of your focus to accomplish what is required, you should chuck multi-tasking out the window and PRIORITIZE what you do at any one time to give each task the focus it deserves.

Intelligent disobedience often involves saying “no” in situations where it is not an expected response. We should all be saying “no” more often when we are expected to be engaged in more than one thing at a time. We are fooling ourselves when we think we believe we can split our focus.

Recently, a colleague of mine turned around a situation with her manager by posing a VERY powerful question. She had been struggling with an ever expanding workload due to a senior manager with ambitions that outreached his ability to prioritize. What was this impactful question she posed to her senior leader?

“To be sure I’m not going to conflict with your actions, what are YOU doing to help bring this objective to fruition?”

What a question! It was posed with a focus on her own work effort so it was not directly threatening, yet it brought home the point that he was not treating this latest “great idea” by directing any of his own time towards it. The resulting discussion about the workload that my colleague was trying to manage, along with the priority of items in that workload was significant, setting a direction for her area of the business and her personal agenda.

This also established a tone for future discussions about new initiatives. All it took was one question; one well crafted question, driven by a desire to share information which was delivered with courage, to make a significant difference in the work environment for herself and her organization.

Few of us in the project world have the extent of authority that would be ideal to bring our projects to bear, especially in a world where most organizations launch more projects than they have resources to support. Given this project glut, and a lack of proper prioritization many project managers end up pulling their hair out trying to create schedules that have a chance of being remotely accurate. Team members come and go, commitment of resource availability changes regularly, and the project schedule becomes fiction almost the moment it is produced. So, how can a project manager work within a set of priorities for team members and their projects, when senior managers do not derive distinct priorities?

We won’t give you the old Nike adage, “just do it”, as this does not work. It takes a bit of a twist to make this work. In the case described above (and other scenarios where appropriate decisions aren’t being made) the astute and intelligently disobedient project manager will talk with their resource managers, derive a reasonable priority for the projects in process, and then create a project schedule with those priorities in mind. The produced schedule would then be accompanied by a note (after a face to face conversation) detailing the priorities derived, explain the rationale for them, and state at the end of the note, “I will manage assuming priorities are in place unless directed otherwise. If different priorities are to be followed, I will make changes according to those revised priorities.”

The self-empowerment shows initiative, and if done with appropriate homework will demonstrate business acumen and the ability to be practical in the face of competing pressures. It might also bring to light some issues that were not known or fully understood by the project sponsor. Lastly, it gives the diligent manager a better chance of creating a project delivery schedule within reasonable bounds, and will gain the support of busy project team members.

We received this story from an attendee at a recent keynote presentation we delivered on Real World Program management…sometimes a simple and common image can show decisions in a different light.

In an Executive Program Review today, I used clipart of a person walking around with a tin cup, collecting coins. Along with the image, I included words to the effect of “I was reviewing the surveillance videos last night, and found this image of the VP of Engineering outside the CFO’s office looking for the $190k in added cost for the project additions approved over the past 7 weeks.”

We do not have a great closed loop on budget adjustments, and I’m sure that now the whole executive staff will recall the $190k in approved budget changes when the VP of Engineering shows up with that cup in hand… 

Sometimes management makes decisions in a vacuum, only when taken in the aggregate do we understand the implications to a program, and the organization as a whole. This was a very provocative and successful way to bring that to light, and make sure the appropriate action was taken to adjust the scope and budget successfully.

Truth from our own point of view – truth only each of us as individuals can bring – is the essence of intelligent disobedience. Packaging it, selling it, promoting it and bringing your truth to the “pool of information” that is used to make important decisions is paramount to being successful. Often it takes some unusual or creative actions to make this information known. Here is an interesting example:

A colleague of ours took a direct approach to getting a message across, in this case to an equipment vendor. She was having considerable difficulty getting appropriate safeguards installed to protect her mining processing equipment against the heat that is common in the Western Australia summer. The vendor (who was from the comparatively cooler climate of Northern Europe) kept attributing equipment failures to maintenance shortcomings, rather than the equipment’s inability to handle the Western Australia heat. She felt certain it was the temperature, and with some simple modifications to the equipment, the heat would no longer be an issue. After considerable perseverance (another trait of intelligent disobedience), she was able to convince a vendor maintenance manager to come to her mining site. Good fortune struck the day her vendor showed up on site, as it was almost 100F (38C), and quite humid. Her intelligent disobedience surfaced in the manner in which she “showed” this vendor maintenance manager how the heat was putting a strain on the operation of his company’s equipment.

Rather than just bringing him for a tour of the site, she arranged to have a few members of her team provide long and intricate details as to how the equipment was being utilized in her particular environment, and exactly what processes they were using to maintain the equipment. In many cases they actually showed the vendor the step by step processes they were using to maintain the equipment. All this was done in the mining maintenance facility, which isn’t air conditioned, in the extreme heat of the day. Add in the dust and noise of the operation of the mining equipment, this turned out to be a two hour demo that the vendor was not soon to forget.

In a somewhat cruel but crafty approach, our project management colleague went back to her air conditioned office after introducing the vendor manager to her staff and getting the demonstrations started. At the end of the demo, the vendor was more than happy to return to her cool office and discuss the equipment modification ideas she had been trying to promote for an extensive amount of time. He was all ears (and a bit of sweat)! After those discussions he enthusiastically carried the temperature tolerant modification ideas forward to his company. In a couple of months time, the engineering modifications were installed on the equipment, and the maintenance issues subsided.

A bit of perseverance, along with come creativity, and another problem is solved via intelligent disobedience!

Sometimes a sound can trigger the needed reaction!

After delivering a conference keynote on Intelligent Disobedience a delegate approached me to share this story…

As a business analyst at a major hospital, he was frustrated by project sponsorship that wasn’t stepping to the plate to establish priorities for critical staff members so the project team could collect appropriate requirements for what was being called a “priority one” project. After many attempts at communication with various sponsors to try to rectify this, the team decided demonstrative action was needed. Using all three of the fundamental elements of intelligent disobedience - risk, creativity and persistence - they decided to try one more attempt at communicating the need.

The team took a “crash cart” - yes one of the hospital rolling carts holding a heart monitor and a defibrillator that was recently repaired and needed to be tested.  They rolled it into the hospital’s Board of Directors meeting. One of the project team members had the heart sensors hooked up to himself under his dress shirt and the monitor was working; it was beeping in the normal way as his heart beat. (Well, maybe a little faster than normal, because he was a bit nervous!) The project manager briefly described the problem and when it came to describing the impact on the project, they unplugged the sensors from the monitor, sending it “flat-lining”, with the accompanying long steady beep tone. That noise alone triggered a reaction with the senior medical personnel that were part of the Board of Directors.

Priorities were then laid out for the needed staff members - the project moved forward to a successful completion. intelligent Disobedience saves the day!