Shifting Your Worry Curve Left with Clint Padgett
Chris: [00:00:00] In this episode of Great Practices, I'm talking with Clint Paget, owner and CEO of Project Success Incorporated. Clint is a seasoned entrepreneur with over 30 years experience in the PMO and project management space. Listen into this conversation as we uncover a catastrophic problem that plagues most PMOs and projects the three phases of every project that succumbs to this catastrophic problem and how you can prevent this from happening.
Plus, find out why face-to-face meetings are still important and well worth the investment reasons. Your project Spidey sense may be tingling and why it's never good to air freight concrete blocks to a construction site.
[00:01:00] We'd like to welcome you to this episode of great Practices, and today we're gonna get right into it without delay because today's episode is about procrastination. Now, there's so many humorous quotes about putting things off until the last minute.
For example, if it weren't for the last minute, nothing would get done. Or why do today what you can put off until tomorrow? Yes, these may make us laugh, but you know what's not funny? Procrastinating on a project that had plenty of time to start until it was put off until the last minute, and now it's too late.
To recover. Stress, pressure and anxiety now plague. The team budgets and schedules are blown. Nothing is delivered. And now we've got people running around in fear of their [00:02:00] jobs. There's certainly no fun in any of the consequences of putting things off into the last minute. Now our guest today is Clint Paget, and he's going to share with us some great practices on not putting things off until the last minute when it comes to our projects.
Clint is President and CEO of Project Success Incorporated, author of the Project Success Method, a Forbes book, author and host of the conversation with Clinton m Paget podcast. Clint, welcome to great practices.
Clint: Chris, it's great to be here. Thanks for having me.
Chris: let's get into this without delay because this is about not procrastinating, right?
So, uh, tell us a little bit about, uh, yourself and what you do.
Clint: So I am the president of and CEO of Project Success. Before that, I was a Coca-Cola employee. Uh, before that I was a Georgia Tech Electrical engineering grad, and before that I was in the US Navy for six years on an aircraft carrier, uh, have an MBA [00:03:00] from Duke University. And then, so I kept it all in the a, c, c for those of you following along at home.
Uh, in 1994, the city of Atlanta got awarded the Olympics. I was a Coke employee at the time. I wanted to work on that project. Knew that wasn't gonna happen as an engineer for Coke, so I knew this company called Project Success, had the contract to work on the Olympics for Coca-Cola. So left the company as an employee on a Friday and was back on the Monday as a contractor, uh, working on the Olympics.
And thought I was gonna do that for just a short period of time, but ended up liking the job so much that 30 years later I'm still doing it and still loving it.
Chris: Those were some bold moves there early on. Right.
Clint: They were, they were, you know, it wasn't, uh, you know, sometimes the, the best pass are the ones that are serendipitous. And that was one that I, I wanted to say a Coke. 'cause obviously Coca-Cola's a great company, but I really wanted to work on the Olympics and then it just opened up a whole new path for me that I didn't know was there.
Chris: Yeah, that's fantastic. So basically what you're saying is you have been running and you've been in this project management [00:04:00] PMO space for the past 30 plus years now.
Clint: Yeah.
Chris: Over those years. What are some of the, just, I don't know, the, the fundamental or the common problems that you've seen.
Clint: Know, there it to quote, uh, top Gun from the original movie. The list is long, but distinguished. Uh, it's. You know, it, there are many, many different problems. Uh, there's people, you have the wrong team assigned. Uh, one of the big ones is you assume everybody knows what the project is and they really, if there's 10 people on the team, there's eight different opinions about what the project is.
You're actually executing the wrong project. It's not the one that's gonna give you what you need to be successful in the marketplace. there's just a whole plethora of them. But I think the two things that are. Really combine together, make projects difficult is at the beginning of a project, particularly one that has a long deadline, let's say a year in the future, which a lot of the projects that I work on do.
There's this tendency among the team to think I've got plenty of time. And then that combined with, they [00:05:00] underestimate the amount of work involved. 'cause they haven't put any thought into it. It's just this nebulous great cloud that's they gotta get done in the next 12 months. And those two things, you overestimate your own availability and you underestimate the amount of work involved.
And those two things together are catastrophic.
Chris: So what is the, um, what, what is the catastrophe? What happens then? You've got all of these. This perfect storm kind of coming together. What's the result of all of this?
Clint: Uh, you end up with failed projects. You throw money at your problems to get 'em to go away. I've seen a project where they had the air freight concrete block to a construction site to hit a deadline. That is not the recommended shipping method. You put that stuff on a truck. You don't put it on a, on a, you know, a plane.
Uh, the other one I saw was we had to run a piece of, uh, we had to run a C one 30 plane to carry a piece of heavy equipment from the US to Russia to meet a deadline for our project. And these were, they were done. Those things happened because we didn't do a good enough plan up upfront, and we got caught unawares.
Chris: Yeah, and like you're saying, and I don't know in those particular situations, but most of the time [00:06:00] you do have time to do that, and you do have time to do it correctly if you had gotten ahead of it. Right.
Clint: You know, I always think it's funny that you hear people saying, you know, we don't have time right now, but you have time to redo it, so why don't you have time to do it right the first time?
So to me it's a matter of take the time up front. And this is, this is the challenge, right? Because people are busy, they're working on more than one project at a time.
They're already overwhelmed and you're suggesting that it takes carve out a few days on the front end of a project to plan it, and you're thinking that's gonna put 'em behind and it doesn't. What it does is by planning the project, what you're gonna do is you're gonna have a roadmap of how you're gonna move forward.
And what we learn, what we learned in project management is that there are many tasks in the pro. Listen, there might be a thousand activities in your project plan, but more than likely, only about a hundred of them are gonna be the ones you have to get done perfectly as planned. Those are the ones that are called the critical path.
And the other nine, the other 900 can be late. And so knowing which ones are on the critical path and which ones aren't is crucial.
Chris: Now you've named, you know, you're talking about this critical path and we're talking about this life [00:07:00] cycle of a project. Now you've named some of these different stages of this path. So let's say we do have plenty of time. It's this project that's a, a year to go, right? And we've got so much time to plan and prepare.
Can you share with us what those stages are and, and what they look like?
Clint: Lemme paint a scenario, right? So basically you get called into the, there's a, there's an all hands meeting, for the, and the business unit vice president is gonna talk about this new product, this new project that's launching, and by invitation, that means you're gonna be on the team. Now you walk into that room and you already have five projects on your plate and various stages of completion.
Some are just starting, some are in the middle, and some are gonna hopefully be closing out soon. 30 minutes later, the, you know, the BU vice president has talked about how important this project is and how he wants to see a real teamwork on this one, and how, you know, we already, we've already announced this through the streets, we gotta make sure we have good numbers, et cetera.
So you walk outta that meeting 30 minutes later and your level of worry about this particular project probably isn't very high [00:08:00] because you got a year to do it. You don't have a plan. There's no plan to get a plan. All you know is you're on the team, you're pretty confident in your own abilities. You've got a year to do it, and your focus is gonna be on the other five projects because those projects, you've got deliverables due tomorrow and next week.
And the next week. Project number six you just heard about is this great nebulous, unplanned thing that you've got 12 months to get done and we know we can get it done in 12 months, you know? We create life in 10 months. I used to say nine, and my wife corrected me on that when having had two kids. She said it's closer to 10 than nine, so I now say 10, but you know, we create life in 10 months.
I'm pretty sure I could do a project in 12, right? So that first phase is called uninformed optimism. I don't know enough to be scared yet. I just know I'm on the team. I got a year to do it. I'm confident in my abilities and I'm gonna get to it, is what I keep telling myself.
Chris: Yep.
Clint: Then you move into the second phase, and this is, this is usually close to halfway through the project, so you know, maybe you're four or five months into the project and you, your, your gut is [00:09:00] telling you you're in trouble.
You know, your, your spidey sense of tingling saying things are not going well. This is where the emails all start to fly. They say, this project's in trouble and it's not my fault. This is where your team member start. You know, you see your team member, one of your team members walking down the hall and you hope they don't bring the project up because you know you haven't worked on it.
And so you also secretly hope they haven't worked on it. And the true statement here, it comes across as a joke, but the true statement is, it's okay to be late is somebody, as long as somebody else is more late than you are, right? That's the key is you don't wanna be the most late guy, so, so now that your level of warrior begins to rise, we call this this phase vague concern.
The reason the concern is vague. Why my spidey sense of tingling and my gut tells me I'm in trouble. I have no plan to measure it against that can, that can show me that I'm behind it. Just I got this really bad feeling. And so then you move into the third and final phase of the project, which is the panic phase.
The panic phase. Nothing good happens. You start working 68 hours a [00:10:00] week, you're throwing people at it, throwing money at it. You're air freighting, concrete block to a construction site. You're doing all kind of crazy stuff. Your budget is blown. And then the quality suffers because. In the panic phase, you're gonna, you're gonna say, you know what?
This is close enough. It it, I know we promised we'd actually do training before we rolled out this new piece of software, but we're just gonna have to push it out and do training on an ad hoc basis. So now your quality begins to suffer. It doesn't mean your quality is is unacceptable, it's just is not what you promised upfront.
So your project quality, you're not gonna meet. And that's called the panic phase. So costs go up, quality suffers, and you're probably gonna finish the project late.
Chris: All right, so lemme get this right. We're talking about uninformed optimism. It's just like it's early on and you think that you're gonna be able to do it, no problem because you overestimate your, your abilities and you underestimate what it's gonna take. You go into vague concern because now. A little bit more time's gone by and you're, you're feeling this level of discomfort, but you're not exactly sure what's causing it.
And then panic ensues once you realize it's like, oh yeah, this thing is [00:11:00] real. I wanna go back to, I wanna go back to vague concern because you mentioned Spidey sense a couple of times there. What, what exactly, like, what feeds into that and what are some of those feelings that, that something is just not right.
Clint: I think the spidey sense, obviously that comes with experience, right? You, you won't, you, the more experience you have, the more your gut tells you things are off track. But just the, even a new, a new person, new to project management shouldn't, should look for things like, are we having regularly scheduled meetings or not?
If they're just ad hoc, then probably. We're off track because people love to talk about successes. Not so much about the fact we're behind and in trouble. Uh, or do you, do people actually turn the other way in the hallway when they see you coming walk the other way? 'cause they don't want to talk about the project?
Um, are you, when we talk about the project that we talking about specifics, like, this task is done, this task hasn't started yet. Are we just talking about Yep. Things look good. Two thumbs up. You know, tho those are not good measures. [00:12:00] Good measures are, I'm gonna be done on Tuesday or, or I was done on Friday, or I'm gonna, I need help.
I'm gonna, I need some help. I'm gonna finish this by next Friday. So you have conversations around real activities and when they're, when what actual work has been done and problems that you're having. The other thing I would say is that if you are on a project and nobody's articulating problems, then something is wrong.
Every project has problems, every single one. And if there's, and this is the thing, when I'm managing projects, I understand that there are gonna be problems. And I'm actually okay with that. I mean, I would love for there not to be any, but I'm okay with problems. What I'm not okay with is a problem that you've known about for months, hoping you were gonna fix it.
And now I'm finding, finally finding out, well, my only option to solve the problem is air freight concrete block. If you told me early on the problem, we probably had multiple options to fix it, but because, and this is, this is just human nature, right? Human nature is just saying, let me, I'm gonna fix this problem 'cause I'm smart, I'm good, I'll figure it out.
No need to raise the [00:13:00] flag, you know, raises up the flagpole and all you've done is burn time. Because now the, I might have had 10 options to solve the problem when you first learned about it, but now you're finally telling me three months later, all of the cheap and easy ones are gone. All I have left is expensive and hard.
Chris: Yeah. What is that? There's that expression bad. News doesn't age well or something
like that. You know, like just, just get it out. Just get it out there. Uh, and I'm also, I'm also grateful of, of understanding why people avoid me in the hallways now because I thought it was something else this whole time.
So that makes me personally feel a lot better. I appreciate that.
Clint: You got it.
Chris: Now your, your company has developed a solution that has greatly reduced this panic phase, right? In keeping people out of that, and it's helped project teams succeed. So tell us a little bit about this solution, this mindset, and how this works.
Clint: So basically what it is, is we call it shifting the worry curve to the left. So you gotta shift the worry curve. And what that means is, as much as you might hate to do it, you've gotta pull the team together. For two, [00:14:00] three days on the front end of the project and as a group, as a team, face-to-face, you are, you agree on what the scope is.
Make sure that matches up with what your customer actually wants, and then the people in the room build their plan for their project. So each of us has, we're on the team for a reason. And so once we, once we've agreed to what the project is, if I'm the IT person, I, I write down, well, these are the IT tasks.
If I'm the manufacturing person, these are the manufacturing tasks. And then together we build a model of the project. So over three days, we have planned our project and we leave the room at the end of day three or day two or day four. Depends on the size of your project. The Olympic ones we typically take.
Two and a half to three weeks to plan. But at the end of the period, you leave the room and you have a plan that you have built that you agree with, that you believe is actionable and is not just only gonna work on paper and not work in real life. So what you've done is you've shifted the worry curve.
Your level of worry now is a little bit higher than it was. It's not zero. Um. It's a little, it is a little bit higher. It's not super high, but you're now [00:15:00] informed. So you're within the first couple of days, you've kicked out the uninformed optimism phase because now when you leave that room, you are just as informed about this project as you are about the other five that you were working on before.
And now you know that for this one year project, you actually have to get something done in week three. And again in week five and in week six or week eight. And so you know, for this project, what you need to do each period of time and when it has to be done and when you need to focus on this project versus the other five, when you can shift your focus back.
So what you've done is you've shifted that worry curve. You get rid of the panic phase completely, and you kind of flatten out the uninformed, uh, you flatten out the vague concern piece and you've, you raise the uninformed optimism piece. 'cause now you're informed. So you have a little bit more worry on the front end.
And it's, it, you know, look, to be honest, there are times when you're, you're level of worry, a little increase to the panic level. It might be that the vendor you selected to do this work in week one and week six is out of business for some reason. Maybe their factory burned to the ground or. You know, whatever the reason might be, they're outta business and now you're in panic mode.
You're gonna, [00:16:00] you're gonna be panicked until you find a new vendor and get them on board and get them selected and get them inside of, you know, get 'em in your SAP system and all those things, but you end up riding this wave of worry throughout the project as opposed to pushing it all off to the end like a bulldozer.
Chris: you bring that panic up sooner, but now you got runway to resolve it and you've got time to fix it, But, but to your point though, it's like, isn't it, so now are you just gonna be stressed about this project instead of being stressed for two months now you're gonna be stressed for nine months.
So, I, I, what's the value of that?
Clint: So that's a great question and that's why I hear a lot. And basically the thing is, it is a different, let, let, let's go ahead and state, I don't think this is always the case. Let's, let's say that it is that that shifting the worry curve results in more overall worry. I'm not sure that's true, but let's say that it is.
Let's say that this way always results in more worry. To your point, it's nine months worth of worry instead of just two months worth of worry. It is a different kind of worry. The panic phase. Worry is the gut wrenching. I can't sleep at night. I got [00:17:00] my stomach's tied up and knots. I'm getting an ulcer.
I'm pulling my hair out. My hair is falling out. All these bad things are happening, right? The pain, your stress levels are just through the roof. With the shift, the worry curve, what you're doing is you, there may be more worry, but it's less stressful worry. It's having to work late some nights, maybe having to work a weekend, but it's just the everyday stress of doing your job and it's not this gut wrenching, sleepless nights kind of worry.
So I would much rather have. Even if it is more overall less stressful worry,
Chris: It's a slow burn is basically what it is then. Yeah, exactly.
Clint: it is. The other thing I hear a lot is, look, I work better under pressure. Okay, no problem. Remember, this is just one of six projects. When I lay all six on top of each other, some of your, one of your activities is always gonna be in the high worry phase, right? And if not, we'll we'll add project number seven.
We're gonna get you to the point where you're always stressed out.
Chris: Yeah. Yeah, that's right, that's right. Now Clinton, you, you, you mentioned something that maybe, I don't know if it works anymore based upon where we are now. You mentioned [00:18:00] phase two phase. Meetings. I heard you say something like two to three days in person. Uh, we're remote now. What's, what's the deal with that?
Is it still important? What's the benefits there?
Clint: Yeah, so it's still important. You know, it depends on the project. If you have simple projects, then maybe you can get away with it without being in, in face-to-face. But the beauty of face, the power of face-to-face, I would say the beauty, but the power of it is you make connections with people when you're face-to-face.
You cannot make, when you're virtual. What we've found is you can run complex global projects remotely for a year, 18 months in, in the Olympics, 24 months. You can run 'em remotely as long as you have that initial planning session face to face, because what you're doing is you're converting someone from an email address.
Do a human, bring a human being that I feel an actual connection to. So, lemme give you an example. Let's say that you and I have worked together, Chris, for, for many years, and I, I've never met you actually, but [00:19:00] I just know when I, when I do my task, I email it to you and you're, you know, you're [email protected] and you do some stuff to the activity and we end up going to market and making money.
Everybody's happy, right? Everybody wins. And you just one of five projects on my plate. So this week, uh, it's Friday, it's eight o'clock at night. I've already put in 65 hours. I'm tired and I haven't gotten to the task that is gonna end up going to you. And I don't really feel guilty because look, I put in 65 hours this week.
It's not my fault. My boss gave me more work that I can possibly do, and so I just shoot you a quick email saying, Hey Chris, this won't come out today. I'm sorry I've been busy this week. I'll get it to you as soon as I can next week. And I sleep well. Because I worked hard this week, and then Monday, Tuesday of next week, I, I finally get around to doing it, send it to you.
Hey Chris. Sorry. This is a, you know, a few days late. Hope things are well, and all I know is you did some magic and the company sold the product. We made money. I'm, I'm, no, I don't even know any better. Right. So then we have a planning session like I'm talking about, where we actually bring people together face [00:20:00] to face.
And I meet you for the first time. Hey Chris, it's really good to put a name with a face. How you doing? Good to see you. And over those two or three days, we're gonna probably have a coffee together. We're probably gonna have a lunch together, maybe we're gonna have the continental breakfast together in the room, and I'm going to get to know a little bit more about you.
Maybe I'll learn that. You have two kids. Well, I have two kids. Well, my son plays soccer. And you say, oh, my son plays football. And so we, we start having this conversation. What we're really doing is we're, we're connecting on a human basis, making a human level connection. So we have that. So we're making these connections and then we go back into the room and we see that I see the critical path up, which is the set of activities that if those are late, the project is late.
And I say, well Chris, I think something's wrong here because I noticed that I'm on the critical path and I feed into you. And I know for a fact on the last project I was a couple days late. And yet there was no, there was no blowback. We actually finished the project on time and Chris says, you're right, Clint, you were actually three days late.
And I remember this vividly because I had to work two weekends to make up for your lateness. And [00:21:00] I know that Clint's a five letter word, but in my household for the, those two weekends, you were a four letter word. Because I had to miss this big event in my son's life, this big event in my daughter's life because I had to work the weekend to make up for your lateness.
Well, now I start to feel bad because I have two kids and I won't, wouldn't have to miss a big in their life because of somebody else. So when I go back to Atlanta, he, Chris is still just, you're still just an email address. You're [email protected], but now you're Chris that has two kids that I had a negative impact and I don't want that to happen again.
So now I make sure that I, I think of you as a human being and I get my work done that's gonna impact you. So you can run complicated, complex, global projects that are long duration projects if you just have that initial 2, 3, 4 day planning session upfront with the team in the room, because you're gonna have conversations in that period that you would never have ev you know, virtually.
I can give you another quick example for this one. I was doing a project for a semiconductor company in, in, uh, Silicon Valley. These two engineers have worked for five plus years remotely, you know, virtually and never actually met each [00:22:00] other. So one is a design engineer who designs the chip, and another, the other guy was a test engineer.
And real quick, what you don't want, you want the test engineer to be somebody different than the design engineer because you don't want, if you, if you do both, you're, you may have bias, right? You know how the chip is supposed to work, so you don't find the flaws. So anyway, they're having this conversation over coffee.
Wasn't even during the planning over coffee and the test engineer assessed the design engineer. Do you know if you made this one change to your design architecture? I could cut 25% of my test time. Now that conversation could have happened at any point over the previous five years virtually, but it didn't until they were in a room together having a side conversation.
Because as we all know, if you're on Zoom or Teams or whatever, you can't wait to get off the call. You're not standing. You're sitting around after the call, having a chat with somebody on Zoom. Soon as the meetings can possibly be over, you're hitting leave. You miss all these great serendipitous conversations that can happen when you're face to face.
So it is a cost, and that's the biggest thing I get is what is the cost of travel. But to me it's an investment. You're gonna [00:23:00] invest 2, 3, 4 days on the front end and by doing that, you won't be late, you won't be air freighting, concrete block, you won't be doing stupid stuff to save your project on the back end.
Chris: To and to your point, you know, it's not gonna be for all projects, but I mean, if you're working on a major. Project millions of dollars, you know, just months and years. What is that in the grand scheme of things, to start off on that, on that right, on that right foot. I had to look up serendipitous, but it is a perfect word.
The occurrence in development of events by chance in a happier, beneficial way. And that's exactly what it is. It's just that, it's just a chance meeting that you end up in the elevator together or you end up like you're saying, you know, lunch together or something and that conversation comes up. So, excellent advice.
Um, now I think. Clint, I'm gonna summarize our conversation in one quote that you had in chapter three of your book where it was talking about, you know, shifting the worry curve to the left. And that quote was, the sooner I fall behind, the more time I have to catch up. And I think you attribute it to anonymous, but whoever that was, it [00:24:00] is a perfect quote.
And that's exactly what I think I got out of, out of today's, uh, today's episode. Now, if there was just one. Great practice that you would want our listeners to take away today. What would that be?
Clint: I would say don't be afraid to put in the time upfront to plan because any, any time you put upfront planning, you are going to see multiple of those days saved on the back end of the project. Don't be afraid,
Chris: Perfect. What is the best way for people to learn more about you? Your business? Shifting the worry curve to the left, reading a book, whatever it is that you. I think is the best for people to connect with you with.
Clint: So welcome to just to come to the website, project success.com. Uh, you'll be able to download the white paper called Shift the Worry Curve and Get up More Details and what whatnot, just kinda skimm through. You can, obviously, I would gladly sell you the books. You can get 'em on Amazon. One is the Project Success Method and my latest one is How Teams Triumph.
So either one of those.
Chris: Excellent. All right. And you're all over LinkedIn too, so, we just encourage [00:25:00] everybody to connect with you and look forward to some of those future conversations. Thanks for being on today, Clint.
That was another great episode of great practices, and we certainly do appreciate Clint joining us today. What were some of the great practices and insights that came from today's episode? Well, I like the fact that he started out with the long and distinguished list of common problems that plagued most projects, but one that was catastrophic is when we underestimate
The amount of work that's going to be involved to complete a project and we overestimate our capabilities, the result of that is certainly going to be a failed project.
Now we talked about the different stages of this path, that occur when we underestimate the amount of work involved and we overestimate our capabilities. The first phase is uninformed optimism. We don't know enough to be scared yet we've got that [00:26:00] year long runway ahead of us. We just know that we're on the team, we're confident in our abilities, and it's all good.
Then we move into vague concern. So this is maybe four to five months that we've been burning up in that year long schedule, and this is when that Spidey s sense starts tingling. And, uh, we've got that feeling. Ooh, I hope they don't Bring up that project in this meeting, or I hope that they haven't worked on it just as much as I haven't worked on it.
this is that gut feeling that something is wrong, but there's really no plan to measure it against. Then it falls into the full blown panic. Phase. This is where nothing good happens. And now we find ourselves near the end of that project.
We got two months left. Now there's 60 to 80 hours work week. People are just throwing money and people at the project quality stuffers, and it just ends up to be just a fire drill, which really could have been prevented if we had taken the time [00:27:00] upfront to plan.
So what is it then that was involved when he was talking about reducing this panic phase? Well, this was fundamentally the, the core message that came out of today's episode is shift the worry curve to the left. Pull the team together early on, you find out that you've got this big project, you got a year to do it.
Pull the team together, spend two to three days, four days, whatever it's gonna take based upon the size of that project. Upfront, face-to-face, build the plans, build a model of the project, and find out that these steps and these tasks are actionable. They're not just on paper, but now you've got a plan that's gonna allow you to get from the beginning to the end of this.
Early on. So yes, he acknowledges the fact that, you know, the level of worry is gonna be a bit higher early on in the project, but it's a different type of stress. It's a different type of concern, something that can be managed versus at the [00:28:00] panic phase when it's just out of control and it's sleepless nights and it's, people worrying about their jobs and all the insanity because this thing was put off to the last minute.
And he painted that image. He says, basically the goal is get rid of the panic phase all together. Like just get rid of that. And then you can flatten out that vague concern phase. It's gonna be there, but you can flatten that and then raise uninformed optimism.
So the sooner that we become informed about this project, the lower that vague concern curve goes down because we know if we're on track, we know if we're off track, we know what we're being measured against, and we can take steps in order to mitigate the panic phase and getting so far behind. I like the fact that he talks about face-to-face is still the way to go.
We get it. We're all virtual. But there is such a benefit, especially if it's a large project, to get together face-to-face, [00:29:00] build those relationships, have those serendipitous conversations where this insight, these revelations and these aha moments could come out that that is just not going to happen through a teams meeting or a zoom meeting.
So still critically important to have those face-to-face meetings early on. And if the whole conversation could be summed up, it really could be taken from a quote that he included in his book. The sooner I fall behind, the more time I have to catch up. So just shift that worry curve to the left and take his his advice at the end.
Don't be afraid to put the time upfront to plan. Nothing to be scared of there. Go ahead and shift that worry curve to the left plan upfront and you're gonna find that, uh, your projects will run much more smoothly and be that much more successful. So we'd like to thank Clint for being on great practices again today.
And do you have a great practice that you'd like to share? Uh, you could just go ahead and send an [00:30:00] email to Chris dot Kopp k [email protected], chris dot [email protected], and someone will get in touch with you shortly. Also be sure not to miss out on a single episode by subscribing to great practices on your favorite podcast platform.
And if you like what you hear, we've had some great guests on, we've got many more to come. Be sure to share this with your manager, colleagues, and any others you think would benefit. So thanks again for listening to this episode and keep putting great practices into practice.
