Do your clients seem crazy?
By Sarah Gilbert

Seemingly erratic behavior by customers or managers cannot be understood without considering their beliefs and circumstances.

I had worked in technology consulting for less than a year when I started to realize that all of our clients were “crazy.” At least that’s what most of my co-workers thought, and I was starting to agree with them.

For a while, I wondered if it was us. Was there something special that our company offered that seemed to attract the biggest loons? So, I changed jobs to work with different clients and different co-workers. But those clients were crazy, too. (Even crazier, actually.)

By that time, I had a large enough sample size that I needed to start re-thinking my hypothesis. It wasn’t statistically possible that everyone in our organization was sane while everyone in their organization was nuts. This re-considering also happend to coincide with moving to a more senior position within my new company.

In spite of what my former peers might have thought, I hadn’t joined the dark side or become a bubblehead after sticking an upper management title on my business card. I had simply acquired more context, because I had more access to the beliefs and constraints that were driving the clients’ decisions. And although I was able to confirm that a few of them were really, truly nuts, most of them weren’t.

Instead of wondering why we were suddenly trashing a component of a product that seemed to be central to its appeal in the middle of the project (leading me to conclude once again, that the client was crazy), I saw it as a rational decision made under budget or competitor duress. I also started to get the sense that the client might think we were crazy, too. Maybe we were.

I have since come to the conclusion that most people are almost always acting rationally IF (and that’s a really big “if”), you take into consideration both their circumstances and their beliefs. And that is where the rub is. Most people don’t go around spouting what their beliefs are. In fact, some people aren’t always aware of what their beliefs are. Further complicating the issue is that most of us also assume that our beliefs are the same as others.

Let’s say, for example, that I’m a manager and I believe that technology is the same as magic. So, as your boss, I would like you to invent a perpetual motion machine. You, the proud owner of an undergraduate degree in physics, explain to me that it will not be possible. Because, according to important laws of the universe, eventually our machine would come to a grinding halt.

“But why?” I ask.

“Because of laws that have to do with friction and thermodynamics,” you say.

“I think those are just excuses,” I say.

This could go on forever, until, ideally one day you uncover the fact that I believe in magic, and I actually believe that you are really a magician, even though your job title says technical developer. Making this discovery is unlikely to make you change my belief, but at least now you have a better understanding of my point-of-view. This is crucial to your communication with me (and my communication with you, incidentally).

So, next time, you think someone is just crazy, poke around and try to find out why they might be acting that way. Consider who they are and what circumstances they’re in. If you can get outside your own crazy ideas, they might just seem a little more sane after all.

Sarah Gilbert is a project management consultant and can be reached at
sarah.gilbert@what-if-project.com.

Filed under Project Management - General