I Wish I Was a Goldfish

With the recent return to somewhat-normalcy, I’ve been able to get out of the house and see my friends more. I was at a friend’s house recently watching a T.V. show called Ted Lasso. It’s a comedy starring Jason Sudeikis about an American football coach who gets hired to coach a professional soccer team in England. The show is funny but also very inspiring; Ted knows nothing about soccer but has such a positive mindset that he manages to win over the hearts of his team, his staff, and the locals. While Ted is coaching practice, Sam, one of the players, makes a bad pass and loses the ball for his team. Sam is from Nigeria and has been struggling with his confidence since he moved to England, away from his family, friends, and culture. Ted calls him over and Sam apologizes, expecting to be chastised. Instead, Ted asks, “Sam, do you know what the happiest animal on earth is?” When Sam looks confused, Ted continues, “It’s a goldfish – do you know why?” Sam shakes his head, and Ted continues, “It’s because they have a ten-second memory. Be a goldfish, Sam.”

As a PM, part of my job is dedicated towards “worrying.” More officially, it’s called “risk planning.” Good PMs are supposed to think about what could go wrong with their project and develop a contingency plan should the risk become an issue. It’s definitely an important thing to do – projects can fail because of a lack of risk planning, or they can succeed despite curveballs because your team anticipated something in advance.

However, I think there’s also some value in “being a goldfish” at the right times. I took this quote from Ted to mean that it’s important to stay focused on the present, not to dwell on past mistakes or worry too much about things that may never happen. While it is important to consider the potential risks in a project, it’s also crucial to make sure that you don’t get stuck in “analysis paralysis”, where you and your team discuss all the exceptions, things that could go wrong, etc. and never end up making any progress.

I’m managing the Livelink Migration project right now, and we’re migrating data that we’ve been storing on Livelink for the past 20+ years to SharePoint. Livelink is used throughout the institute, and we had over 300 workspaces to migrate, each with a different owner and group of users. As we were planning the migration, our team kept discussing the users that would be exceptions: Group A who will need to have very secure permissions, or Group B who has critical processes that can’t have any downtime. The migration experts that we hired encouraged us not to focus on those exceptions in the beginning, but instead to iron out a standard migration process for an average group of users and begin migrating these typical groups. It was tough for us to shift our focus, but it was the right decision. Once we created an end-to-end process for migrating a standard group, we became more confident in our knowledge of the migration process, and as we realized that the groups with exceptions were the minority of our users, we had more time to focus on and determine a solution for each one.

From this experience, I learned that it’s important to stay in the present, and to make sure that risk planning for potential issues doesn’t prevent you from making daily progress on the tasks you can do immediately. One potential solution is to segment your recurring team meetings. Spend the first 50 minutes discussing current action items and save 10-15 minutes at the end for risk planning.