Are we adults or grown-up children?

Organisation Culture

We hear children complaining about their friends, siblings, and family members. We listen to kids complaining about headaches, skin rashes, and so on.

As parents, we help them understand their problems and resolve them. Kids are not mature enough to identify and solve their problems. So, they need help.

On the other hand, we consider ourselves adults and assume we can identify and solve our problems.

But do we?

Numerous Project meetings, boardroom discussions, and online chats are full of winges and complaints.

Complaints about project team members, vendors, and customers. Winges about project management tools, methodologies, confusion, and complexity.

Unfortunately, most complaints are about things beyond our control (circle of influence). For the things we can influence, we tend not to do much.

Oh, the customer has no clue about the requirements?

Maybe we need to ask what we can do to help the customer to be more aware of their requirements.

Oh, the vendor team is very disorganised.

Maybe we should talk to someone and escalate.

Mere mourning problems do not lead us anywhere.

We think of ourselves as mature adults. Are we adults or grown-up children?