You watched the room take the word at face value and work through it properly. The plan, the budget, where each piece had got to. All of it about where things stood. None of it about what it had taken to get them there.
They didn’t need to know about the supplier call that nearly didn’t happen. Or the two options you’d already ruled out before the meeting started. Or the third one you still weren’t sure of when you said the words “on track.”
A status update only shows the state a thing is in. It never shows the distance travelled to get it there that morning. You could stand in a room and call a project steady, and be the only person in it who knew how close it had come to not being steady at all.
That gap was the actual job. The update was just the shape the job took once it was safe to look at.
I stood in that gap more times than I could count, and never explained it to a single person in the room. Explaining it would have meant telling them the calm they’d just heard had been built by hand, on my own, an hour before they walked in.
The status update said green.
You watched the room take the word at face value and work through it properly. The plan, the budget, where each piece had got to. All of it about where things stood. None of it about what it had taken to get them there.
They didn’t need to know about the supplier call that nearly didn’t happen. Or the two options you’d already ruled out before the meeting started. Or the third one you still weren’t sure of when you said the words “on track.”
A status update only shows the state a thing is in. It never shows the distance travelled to get it there that morning. You could stand in a room and call a project steady, and be the only person in it who knew how close it had come to not being steady at all.
That gap was the actual job. The update was just the shape the job took once it was safe to look at.
I stood in that gap more times than I could count, and never explained it to a single person in the room. Explaining it would have meant telling them the calm they’d just heard had been built by hand, on my own, an hour before they walked in.
