There’s a wonderful book called Everything I really need to learn in life I learnt from Star Trek by Dave Marianaccio.
Time and time again I am asked in workshops about the difficulty many project managers have in handling “difficult” stakeholders.
Often, like Dave ,when asked difficult questions I think to myself “What would Kirk or Spock say here?”
What I call Spock’s Law emerged at the wrenching end of “Star Trek II The Revenge of Khan”. As usual the dual hyperventilator (or some complex machine with an even more complex name” was melting and the only way the ship and the crew could be saved from dicombulation was for someone to go into the engine room and physically remove some aardvarker thing. OK! Star Trek fans these are not the right terms, I know.
(In moments of sheer idiocrasy, I wonder if the writers who invented those wonderfully complex “technical jargon” terms for Star Trek bits moved into IT after the series was closed.)
Spock decided the logical thing was for him to go into the room and remove the aardvarker .. the downside was that he would die via discombulation or something equally foul. Jim was, of course devastated and, in a scene as powerful as anything Igmar Bergman did (weeelll) Spock - being typicallyVulcan i.e. logical - says
“The needs of the one must not outweigh the needs of the many”
and walks into the engine room, removes the aardvarker, saves everyone, and with a hand moving slowly down the window … dies. The wailing of Star Trek fans could be heard around the world. Of course, fans know that he is re-generated in the next movie and Spock’s Law is reversed … hmmmm … see Spock’s Law redux on this blog.
So here we have a project manager who is attempting to actively include critical stakeholders in the planning and owning of their project (welcome to Agile project management) and one person is behaving in a manner that is marginalizing or negating the power of many others.
Welcome to Spock’s Law.
Assuming all paries have an equal stake in the project, the project manager must confront (hopefully in a positive way) the person who is trying to negate the inclusive process. To give into one difficult person and alienate many other people you will need support from to deliver a successful project is not a good idea.
The very act of confrontation sends a number of positive messages. These include:
One of the core values of Agile project management is courage. Invoking Spock’s
Law is a great example of this.