Problem Solving

I can’t stand mowing the lawn. The other day I got home, sat out front, and just stared at it. The lawn had gotten so high even the dandelions looked overwhelmed. Definitely past the point of ignoring, but I was too tired to deal with it.  I’m not a lawn person. It feels like a…

I was listening to a stand-up comedy routine by Trevor Noah when something he said resonated with me. His therapist told him he has “an inability to not say what’s in his head” and that “the secret to relationships is knowing when to think and when to speak.” That landed a little too close to…

Have you ever attended a scramble party? I did recently. A scramble party is where the host has the best intentions, but doesn’t have a plan. So guests show up to a work-in-progress: someone’s setting the table, someone else is opening wine, someone’s trying to get the music going, another person is asking, “Wait… are…

Yesterday, I opened an email from the facilitator of a program I’d just completed. It began with “Just a gentle reminder to fill out the program survey.”  But the reminder didn’t feel very gentle. To me, it felt almost passive aggressive, and it got me thinking about how often we use phrases like that without…

Sometimes it takes a little chaos “When you arrive at the store and can’t remember why, and you forgot the vet appointment, and almost missed the dentist even though they called you yesterday, and the bills are late, and your kids need homework help, and you are behind at work, and haven’t exercised in weeks,…

There’s no shortage of advice out there on how to be happy. You’ll find tips, formulas, and promises everywhere. One of my articles from earlier this year, Are Happy Project Managers a Myth, has been getting a lot of re-reads lately. Maybe that says something about what people are looking for in their work. The…

Horses are beautiful, majestic animals, but sitting on one reminds you just how powerful they are. I’ll admit that I’m a tad afraid of them.  When my kids were young, they loved horseback riding, so one day we took them and their friends out for a trail ride. I was given a horse named Betsy.…

Have you ever turned snow into a project? Growing up about six hours north of Toronto, Canada, winter was not just a season but an opportunity to create something from nothing. My friends and I would gather outside often with a plan to construct, carefully cutting and stacking blocks of snow to build elaborate forts.…

Did you know there’s a style of managing projects out there that’s basically “by the seat of your pants”?  Officially, it’s called Just-In-Time project management, or JIT, which originated in the construction industry. You’re constantly on the move, creating deliverables as they pop up, often before you even knew they existed. Some people would say…

One of my project sponsors recently asked me, “Isn’t that what project managers do?” The funny part? What she was asking me to do had absolutely nothing to do with project management. It was more like a vague, hand-wavy instruction to “create a thing”, with no details, no direction, and no clear definition of what…