Killing Vampires Means Letting Go
by Miki Saxon
Both Jim Stroup, at Managing Leadership, and Richard Barrett here at MAPping Company Success are discussing the need to avoid wasting resources on projects going nowhere.
Richard calls those projects that won’t die vampires and after reading Jim’s post, he and said, “Yeah, killing vampires is hard. The challenge is not the rational analysis, which that blog describes. It is the emotional act of letting go that causes the difficulty.”
It seems as if I’m always the one that ends up tackling the emotional stuff, so here are some thoughts on letting go.
The unwillingness to let go is anchored in your MAP (the link goes to a blueprint of how to change it).
Letting go is very similar to those team building exercises, variations of which have been around for decades, such as the one where you fall backwards from a height trusting your team to catch you.
It’s scary, not because you’re up that high, but because it requires real trust and the result is outside of your control.
Killing a vampire project is like that.
First, you need to trust that the people around you are giving you straight information with no hidden agendas.
Second, you need to accept that the failure of that version or even the entire project is outside of your control.
Finally, you need to accept that no matter how good you are you won’t always be right.—even Steve Jobs had Lisa and Newton.
Image credit: flickr
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