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Hi everyone. Here is Ricardo Vargas, and this is the 5 Minutes Podcast. One of the things that drive me truly crazy is the amount of complaining I can see project managers and team members do during the project. It means that just by complaining, you are voicing out your frustration and the challenges you are facing, but honestly, you are not moving forward. What makes you move forward is action. If being able to complain was critical thinking on delivering good projects, I would not have a course on project management. I will not have a course on agile. I would create a course on how to complain louder and how to complain better. So, what do we need? We need, of course, we need to understand the challenges, but we need to stop complaining about our projects and we need to move to action. And I want to share with you three quick tips that you can do, and I do all the time to shift this focus from the complaint to the focus on how to solve the problem. The first one is to implement reverse standups to turn complaints into solutions. So instead of, I would say the standup meetings or this traditional meeting where team members discuss their progress. You can implement, if you see that complaints are arising, the concept of reverse standup, where each person presents a challenge, they are facing a complaint, but they also must propose at least one actionable solution to stop that challenge. And then the team will collaborate to refiner and execute the best approach. This will shift the mindset from complaining to constructive problem solving, and this will bring accountability and solution thinking and not problem thinking. The second tip I want to share with you: It's the two-minute rule for micro decisions. I love that! A common reason for complaints is paralyzed by analysis. You think, you think, you think, and you do nothing. And people dwell on problems instead of making decisions. So, you should introduce the two-minute rule. If a decision or action can be taken in two minutes or less, do it immediately. Do it now. Don't put it on paper. Nothing. Do it. And this I learned when I read the GTD book Getting Things Done book by David Allen, where he teaches us that. You do play if the action is quick; just do it now. For example, I need to send a quick e-mail to solve this. I have more problems that I need to fix; I just need to fix and get rid of them. This will eliminate procrastination is bad. It is truly, truly a disaster in your project because everything will pile up at the end, where the most critical moment of your project will happen. The third one is the concept of gamification or, for example, no blame hackathon. So, when complaints pile up, you reframe them into opportunities. So, what you can do, you can organize a no blame hackathon. Why no blame? Because I'm not trying to blame another person. I'm trying to find a solution. Remember, it's not the focus on the problem but the focus on the solution. So, what do I do? A short, high-energy section. It's like a game where the teams treat projects and roadblocks like a challenge to hack into real-time. So, it's like a hackathon to think about the news. But this hackathon is to think about ways of getting rid of the problem. So, what do you do? You create a time box sprint and ask the teams to come up with prototype solutions for that specific problem. So, you can have 3,4,5 groups, and each of the groups can tackle one challenge, one problem, or one complaint, and then you will prototype solutions for that problem. So, these will create an engaging and positive mindset for your team. What is important? Everything does is to sheath the focus from frustration to action. When you stop, you know, complaining, complaining, complaining. And focus on possible solutions to mitigate the challenges. Then, you are moving towards the solution, and remember this will not eliminate the problems of your project. It is hard, and it's hard by DNA. If projects were easy, we would not be project managers. Will not need methodology, we will not need tools. We need all of that. It's because it's not easy at all. So, think always about it. So, projects are not easy, and you cannot think about them as something that you know, you just complain and thinks just happen. Think about that. And see you next week with another 5 Minutes Podcast.
