A perspective I couldn’t see
I once worked with a client responsible for developing an innovative community facility in the inner city. It was on surplus Department of Education property and the key project partner was an NGO focussed on supporting education in young people. The vision for the centre was a place that could support a largely First Nations local community to thrive through education and out of school activities.
I struggled to get traction with the local community and couldn’t figure out why. Then someone talked to me about what was going on. We were dealing with First Nations people, on Department of Education land managed by a church-based NGO. I was told about the scars of the stolen generation and how religious and educational institutions may even to this day be seen by local communities through the lens of those experiences.
As a middle-class white guy from the comfortable ‘burbs I thought the project was about how to create a great facility. Turns out it was also about how to navigate history and its ongoing impacts.
Trust is the issue
Years later I worked with an organisation on a redesign of a critical workspace so that the parts of the business could work more effectively across their internal silos in an emergency situation. The project was ostensibly about how to physically improve the space. But over time it became clear that for many it was principally about how to survive long enough for the new ‘disruptive’ leader to move on and let us get back to BAU. It was about lack of trust and low commitment to change.
Why is this windfarm about gender politics?
And more recently I worked with an interesting small business with a global practice, in this case leading an international team on a renewable energy project in South Asia. The project appeared to be about how best to create a windfarm. But for my client, a small local team of capable women, their dilemma was also how to manage the cultural differences and gender politics across a team of mostly male technical specialists from several developing nations.
Context Dilemmas
Each of these experiences taught me something about the dilemmas we face when tackling projects. There is always a project or content dilemma and this is where we focus most, even all, of our energy. But that dilemma doesn’t exist in beautiful isolation. Rather it is nested in an often invisible or subconscious web of social, cultural, political, power dynamics and other stuff that is unavoidably part of any complex situation.
What to do with this?
If you are working with a diverse group of stakeholders on a challenging problem, you will also have context dilemmas that can make life hard for everyone. Best thing to do is make them visible. Between you, you can’t ‘fix’ them, but by explicitly incorporating them into your project dilemma you are better positioned to move ahead. The question becomes “given these context issues, how do we best deliver our project….”
What are your context dilemmas and how are you surfacing them? If you want to build some skills to work across content and context dilemmas, join our upcoming training program for collaborators.