Transparency

"You will never land smoothly on borrowed vividness."

— John McPhee (American writer)

When the highlight reel of our success is blemished, it’s tough to share what went wrong. But there’s a lot of value to be gained from hiding nothing. A project management tool helped me understand why such transparency matters.

Ascension to Basecamp

Project management is a task, it’s part of a job title, and it’s also a $1.2billion software industry. Long meetings, disjointed email threads, and repetitive revision of objectives were once the norm. Software is now changing all of that.

For our team, project management evolved when all our written communication moved from email to a platform called Basecamp. Our objectives sharpened. Discussions grew specific. Verbose email greetings and sign-offs vaporised. The transition to software-enabled project management was as smooth as it was surprisingly swift. It all ran without a hitch. For a while.

The Window-shopping Problem

On the 9th November, 2018, six months after the near-seamless transition to Basecamp, I logged on to the platform to post a group announcement. I couldn’t. Somehow, everything we’d ever put on Basecamp was frozen in read-only mode. I was stuck window shopping my team’s data. Something was wrong and it wasn’t a problem I could fix. It seemed like a pain but I imagined it was nothing compared to that of the Basecamp programmers scrambling to restore order.

The day after the incident, I was relieved to find that all project management tools on Basecamp had been fully restored. Effective team coordination, back in action. I thought nothing more of it, but a few days later, an unusual text box appeared atop the Basecamp user interface. It made me think again.

The Postmortem

Normally, I’d look at six panels on the screen: the Campfire (a sort of group chat room), Messages, To-Dos, Schedule, Check-ins, and Docs & Files. The new text spread out like an umbrella over the usual stuff. It was an announcement all about the read-only software glitch on Basecamp. The company was inviting users to click a link to a report. I had no idea that I was about to learn an eloquent lesson in owning one’s mistakes...

Continue reading the full article on the reid_indeed leadership blog here.