Mar 05 2008
Perspective and Project Timing
I was checking up on one of my grad school friends today (he writes for Nobel Intent over on ArsTechnica) as I like reading his articles. Next to one of his articles was another post on Mount St. Helens and the changes over time in the magma dome there. Quite interesting especially when you take a look at this link that shows a time lapse aerial view of the volcano crater from 2004 to 2007. I started considering how different this looks in time lapse compared to what it would have looked like if one had visited the volcano rim once every month in person for that same time frame. You wouldn’t have even noticed any change from a monthly view, but in the time lapse view you see rock and glacial ice move more like water. What a dramatic difference time scale makes to perception.
While looking at the time lapse movie linked above I starting thinking about how concept is fairly universal and might apply to business and innovation projects. Anyone that has worked on a work project of any length whether related to innovation or not has encountered the situation where program progress takes longer than someone thinks it should. I was thinking about this today especially as it relates to time-scale expectation for a programs with larger impacts and time horizon. Those longer term projects that are expected to pay off in 2 years seem to be an eternity when business performance of your organization is measured on a quarterly type basis.
Then I started thinking about what project timing expectations are associated with where you are in an organization. The sales person whose salary is based on short term sales has a drastically different tolerance to project time than an Executive whose main concern is steering a business to strategic position for long term success. So the theory of relativity says your program or project will be looked upon dramatically different depending on the time horizon of those viewing it.
