July 30, 2025

For obvious reasons

Footbridge

Every project gone bad has suffered from strained or stilted or insincere communications across the team. There are cliques. Rogue (or running alone) actors who won’t or can’t let anyone into their thinking. There are missed deadlines, misunderstood requirements, missing deliverables. The team never took the time to build trust, never prioritised the outcomes, lost focus on the purpose, the process, the principles they agreed to (and the ones they failed to identify).

Every project gone good had clarity. The how may not have been explicit at the beginning, but everyone worked to a common and well understood goal, to timescales they honoured and with open loops when they couldn’t. Nobody protected themselves. They did what it takes to work together.

Any time you shake your head about anything from the first paragraph, try to move it to the second.

Skippy strategy: Projects go bad … for obvious reasons.

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Skippiness