Surviving Death March — How do You Get the Wings which Work for Air Turbulence
Death March
A software project is like a war. It contains full of uncertainty. It requires a huge amount of funds. There are many players around the software projects including your team members as troops, allies whose names are the stakeholders (sometimes they can be enemies as well). Because of its complexity, almost all the projects won’t work in the way initially planned. Badly, we sometimes see the situation of the “death march”.
In this article, I would like to talk about how we can survive the death march, or even leverage it for our carrier development as engineers.
Lithe Wings
How was the experience when you get the airplane for the first time in your life? My experience was when I was about 12 years old. It was pretty much a scary experience for me. I was in a window sheet and looking at the wings. I could not believe that the wings of the plain were keeping waiving during the flight. Every time a strong wind hit the wing, it waved. It was so scary for a 12-year-old boy not knowing any science at that time. I was worried that the wings are broken, and I fell into the land from an altitude of 10,000m.
After I entered the college of technology, I learned stiffness property in physics. Now I know wings are safe because they wave. Flexible materials won’t break easily because they distribute the force as the material bends.
This analogy works for psychology as well. A flexible mindset is a good asset to deal with severe situations in your life. If you have a flexible mindset, you can easily deal with a severe project — even a death march. That’s what I have learned past two years after learning psychology intensively.
There are several approaches to get a flexible mindset.
Growth Mindset
Dr. Carl Dweck found that there are two types of mindsets: the fixed mindset and the growth mindset. A fixed mindset makes people assume that the fundamental ability of the individuals are bounded by their natural ability and cannot be changed. A growth mindset, on the other hand, makes people believe that they can improve themselves by their effort.
In her study, kids who have a growth mindset willingly take more difficult puzzles. They did not scare of the challenge. They recognize the challenges are the key to further growth. Fixed mindset kids, on the other hand, avoid difficult puzzles. Because they believe that their ability is bounded by their birth, they are scared of failure. Failure means that they are looser in a lifetime. You can easily imagine that the growth mindset type of people are more successful as they make more challenges and learn from failure.
Growth mindset holders are not simply strong for failures. Instead, they are more relaxed to accept failures. As a result, they can make more challenges, make more failures, which results in a lot of learnings and growth for them.
You can learn about the growth mindset of Dr. Carl Dweck’s book. You can find many positive aspects of a growth mindset, and scientific proof that your ability is not bounded by your born.
Mindfulness
Mindfulness is another approach to get waving wings. Mindfulness is the state of your mind that observing your situation from a subjective point of view. When we make some big mistake, we can view ourselves from a subjective point of view just like watching Netflix shows at the weekend. This will allow us to observe and analyze the situation without panic. This allows us to be resilient for any failure, and to be calm so that we can learn from the failure.
Simple training to be mindful is “meditation”. I have continued 20 mins of daily meditation in the morning for the past 1 year. I feel that it’s much easier to handle negative emotions like anger, anxieties, and fears. There are several studies that mindfulness (or meditation) works for mental problems, and even increases regional brain gray matter density. As we see even scientific study, I strongly recommend people to try some meditation.
There are a lot of articles and books regarding mindfulness. The following book would be helpful for engineers/engineering managers to know how Mindfulness improves your engineering organization.
Self-compassion
Self-compassion is a psychological concept introduced by Dr. Kristin Neff. Just like compassion to others, self-compassion will care and accept yourself too.
We as humans tend to be self-judging or even critical when we make mistake. Instead, self-compassion makes us accept ourselves including the bad part. Self-compassion is close to the concept of Mindfulness. Both are the attitude to accept the reality as-is not making any judgment. Self-compassion is more specific to care for ourselves.
Self-compassion is especially important to make a big challenge. You MUST make some mistake if you make a big challenge. If you have not made any mistakes, you are not making challenges. Self-compassion allows you to accept your failure and learn the best from it.
I am a person making a lot of mistakes. I used to be very reactive to my failure in the past. Recently, I keep reminding the concept of self-compassion whenever I make mistakes. The concept helps me in control, be effective to recover from failure.
You can find the book from Dr. Kristin Neff below.
Fly High with Waving Wings
I introduced several psychological concepts to survive in tough situations. I had several severe situations (even like the death march) in the past several years but feels are much effective because of those.
Those concepts all help people be flexible and resilient, just like waving wings. If you have hard diamond wings, they look pretty stable but you won’t be able to survive air turbulence. They might be stable for some shock, but can be broken into half for a strong one.
Having waving wings will make you survive any project even death march, and leverage the experience to fly higher.
