Perspectives on grass

Despite what researchers Cheech and Chong have proposed in their late 70’s papers, the grass is never greener on the other side.

There is a delusional tendency among IT consultants to believe that their next gig will be much better than the one they are currently on. When asked to describe their current client/project, most consultants will expand on total lack of management, fuzzy work objectives, intense politics and psychotic CIOs. They will tell you about unbelievable events that took place in front of their eyes. Stories about enraged PMs knocking down white boards, stoned workers and even people going at it in meeting rooms.

When those same consultants are assigned to a new project, they go through a honeymoon phase that lasts a short time. They are relieved to exit their current nightmare, they end up at a bar on their last day to celebrate the end of their detention and the group has a good time joking about the unbelievable things that made their life soooo miserable for months. If you ask those consultants at that precise moment what’s their outlook on the next project, they will tend to be very optimistic. Dude, it can’t be that BAD again, this is impossible. Or I’m sure the next team is better managed, one of my friends has been there for a year.

Let’s say you cash your $900 annual bonus and you hop on a plane to Vegas. You go the Bellagio because you feel lucky. You play the roulette and you put $100 on red. The ball hits black and you lose. You re-do the same bet, putting again $100 on the same red square. Damn it, the ball also landed in the back zone. You repeat this pattern another 5 times, and the freaking ball always land on black. Your mind tells you that the ball has landed on black 7 times, so there are strong odds that it will land on red the next time, right? It ain’t so obviously, as the ball always has a 50% chance of hitting red, and it has no memory of where it got the previous times. Researchers call this the “casino bias”.

Consultants have a similar bias, they’ve hit a string of failed projects and their subconscious tells me the next one will be a winner. Difference is, the game is rigged. There are no great projects, the ball can never land on red. Why is that?

Great projects do exist but they are done by a very small team of smart and internal people. Projects that involve dozens and dozens of people are usually doomed to fail, the smart people know this so they exit these projects as fast as they can. So the client brings in contractors to do the job, it has really no choice and it will be willing to pay big bucks for someone to save his butt. Careers and egos are at stake, remember? When the payload of IT consultants land on the site and there’s a kick-off meeting, the project is already in a terminal phase so to speak. The ship is still horizontal but there’s a 40 feet gap in the hull. Start pumping and enjoy the ride.

Consultants then realize that this gig will be worse – much worse - than the previous one. They remember fondly the old team, how they wished they were still there if they hated the place a few weeks ago. They’ll even have lunch with colleagues that are still on the former project, inquiring about the latest local drama. Then the consultants will go through the cycle again, they accept their current fate and their hope is now on the next project which surely will be much better. Seniors know better and they just KNOW things won’t improve.

There is no green grass. Just a slab of cold concrete.