Week 5 — The Inner Archive

Turning Yesterday into Foresight

Series: Self-Reflection & Self-Leadership for Project Managers (Week 5/6)

In an organisation where I worked with a digitalization and financial streamlining program I learned the value of an archive the hard way. We ran 25 parallell projects and after about a year we saw a number of projects slip for reasons we never seemed to catch early. Different departments, different vendors, different teams but the same aftertaste. We had “planned” for the work but not for the approvals that trail it. We kept telling ourselves a fresh story each time to explain the slip, but we also felt something else, we had a feeling of déjà vu and our novel explanations could not wash it away. What we were missing wasn’t intelligence, it was memory we could trust.

There’s a West African image that helps us name this: Sankofa—a bird looking back while moving forward, an egg in its beak like a carried lesson. Sankofa means “Go back and get it”, and literally it tells you that if you have forgotten something, you should go back and get it, it is ok to go back and get it! So in our perspective around self-reflection, the reflection matures when it stops being a feeling and becomes an archive—something small, reliable, and usable under pressure, like a small knowledge capsule. Not a novel of your inner life, not a ritual of blame, just a clear trail of what you chose when it mattered and what the world did next.

Back to our 25 projects… We started with what we called a learning log book. We decided that after any meaningful moment lika an approval, escalation, design cut or any other moment where we sensed there was a learning for us, we should log it! We wrote the choice, the mechanisms in play, and the first signal that came back. Within weeks a pattern surfaced where we could start to see which of our choices and habits that showed up consistently in the projects that started slipping. That tiny archive didn’t make the work lighter but it made us more honest. Once we could name the mechanism or situation contributing to the slip, we stopped asking people to do things that we thought would rectify the situation and started asking them to do things we strongly believed would help, and in hindsight that reflection helped us to improve the accuracy of our corrective actions. The fires didn’t vanish completely but they got quieter.

A simple model to try this week

We can call it the 3-L model, and you should keep it short. When something important lands and are finalized and ready for you to reflect upon, look back just far enough to state the decision you made, what the options were and what was at stake. Then learn by writing a single sentence, or two, about the mechanism that actually drove the outcome. Finally you want to leverage it by making one pre-commitment you will test the next time you face the same type of situation or shape of a problem. You are not trying to be comprehensive but you are aiming at being reusable.

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Below we take a look at the IDG´s and how you practically make the best use of the 3-L model in your everyday (PM) life.