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Hello everyone, welcome to the Five Minutes Podcast.
Today I like to talk about how we can support future generations to work in life in project work, in a project environment.
And I want to say this because I did a keynote recently at the Brazilian Congress for project management, and I spoke exactly about that. So what his career, what is the future of work for, all of us. And before I go to my three quick tips with you, I want to explain to you what it is in my mind, a definition of what is project management, okay?
So I know that some people like the word project manager in some people don't, and for me, I don't care if it doesn't matter, but for me, I translate as project management, everything you do in terms of management capability, attitude, behavior, mindset, to connect ideas, to reality.
So everything you do, all tools techniques, human capabilities that you put in place to help you to bring ideas to life is what is call project management, ok?
If you go to Wikipedia, there's you find many other definitions, but for me, this is a very broad definition because this includes any type of delivery approach you may want to use, so if you are using, I would say agile adaptive, so you can understand project management as this kind of capability to connect ideas to reality. And what is happening today is that this is my belief. I believe that most of us, if not all, are poorly prepared to live in this changing world.
The education I received in the education that most received it’s far more related to the routine to control, to how you can keep stability to a process, how you can keep stability to a business, and what we see today's is the opposite of that.
So my first deal that we should think about, and we should support them on understanding is that the world that we live in today is not bad. It's not worse than it used to be. We tend to think things are becoming worse, and this is no, the word is just different. It's just different.
So many assumptions that we use to consider valid 20 years ago are no longer valid. And it doesn't mean that this is bad, but because we are not very keen on changing many people see these as a threat. So we need just to keep their minds open. So if you have children and they are starting working, we need just to explain to them that the world we live in, can be amazing, incredibly good, It's just different. Ok, for example, when you’re working on a project and you always have this personal nightmare, that one day the project will come to an end. And what I will do afterward?
So people feel this fear and people want to avoid working in this environment because this environment is not stable or is not a job for life. What we need is just to create a conscious decision on every one of the future generations that the world we live in is just different. Things are not permanent as they used to be. And this brings me to the second point we need to do to make them understand what is the new concept of permanent. There is no, I would say job for life anymore, and these many people may think, oh, this can be a threat.
Of course, it can't be. Everything can be a threat, but everything also can be a great opportunity for all of us to reinvent ourselves, disrupt ourselves, and move on. So we need to understand that the concept of permanent becomes relative now. So if you're working on a project that is supposed to take one year, or that is releasing a new product that will take half a year, this is the concept of permanent for you. In what brings you, I would say your, stability as a project management professional, where someone working in a project management environment, is one: your competence, two: your experience. You know, things that you have in your own life that made you better, that made you learn, okay?
Maybe you learned through failure. Maybe you'll learn through a good experience. And this is what brings you the value that will give you the protection you are looking to have with this permanent environment. So it's a new concept, it’s a new way of work, and this is becoming more and more present in our life. I need to tell you it's pretty much impossible today to work in a professional environment, without projects. I don’t know, I struggle to see anyone if you're a lawyer, who will work delivering projects because every single lawsuit you have is a project. So if you work in marketing's the same, If you are a doctor, you can consider a patient a project. This is embed in every single human activity.
And this drives me to the third point. Routine became a small part of our life. And this is concerning because we are routine humans, we love routine. Our body loves routine. We love to do things the same way, we love to have predictability stability, when I started my career in project management was all about how you control in to bring stability to the project. Today, bring this stability is close to impossible, and then today we talk about how do we navigate complexity?
How do you navigate in a turbulent ocean? Because routine, if you imagine you are day to day, listening to this podcast, you see that your day, despite maybe taking a shower or eating or do everything else, was a project work every day is a different day. Every day is a different routine, and this is part of our life and our work, and we need to prepare future generations to live this way today with the pandemic. And these things are far more distributed, things are far more open, far more diverse people working virtually probably soon with some law of requirements, people will work from everywhere to everywhere.
And this will raise questions about what it is, a working visa, a visa, a working permit. You know, if you are not working physically in a place, how does this work? So this is the understanding we need. 'cause. If we understand that the world we live in is not bad but different. If we make them understand this new concept of what is permanent. And if we acknowledge that routine is just a small fraction of our life, we will have, I would say that underlining behavior to start navigating to the project work, and this is extremely related to what I just said or a related to the PMBOK seventh edition, all the 12 principles, all of them, they are trying to underline this navigating complexity, focus on value, managing stakeholders. These are exactly the adaptability and resilience.
This is exactly to support you to have different behavior, towards the future we are in today. So share this podcast with your child or not child maybe anymore, or your child or a nephew or a niece, share with them and show them that there is a way and a new mindset that they need to be able to understand, so they can succeed in this new environment.
I hope you enjoyed this podcast and see you next week with another Five Minutes Podcast.
