Agile Business Navigator

Working on understaffed and overtasked projects, projects with impossible goals, crummy software, lousy furniture, broken computers, horrible design, antiquated methods, everything you can think of that makes a project suck – all pale in comparison to the person in charge who is swimming in a pool of sharks and refuses to ask for help.

Its so hard to stand on the sidelines and watch the sharks circle, so hard in fact, that frequently we jump in with the victim in a blind effort to 'save' them. Like the bystander that jumps in to save a drowning person and loses their life – it can cost us and our project far too much.

Is there a way to save a person who doesn't want to be saved? As a consultant, that's usually my job. Save a project that's gone too far down the drain to be saved. I end up patching this, band-aiding that, get it running – then come back in and reconstruct it the right way from the other side.

But if I'm not being asked for my opinion or help, how do I just stand along the sidelines and watch the person go down for the third time? If I've offered to help and its been ignored or discarded? How do I watch them make extra work for themselves, ignore tools that will help, do everything themselves, do it all the hard way?

How do we learn to let people fail?