If you work in an office, you know conference calls take on a life of their own.  This is especially when project deliverables are in question and people are trying to determine to figure out what the hold-up is.  Usually everyone has to pony up their failures when they happen and try to move forward.

But – there’s a rare breed of individual.   This is the type of individual that can take a sentence and use cognitive dissonance to make the first part of the sentence SEEM to justify the last part of the sentence .  In reality – when you examine it up close – you’ve just been swindled!  The two parts are COMPLETELY in disagreement with each other.

And that brings us to this anecdote.   I spend a lot of time on the phone due to multiple project responsibilities.  I deal with customers, vendors, and other contractors all over the country on many different projects.  In the not-too-distant past of of those projects had some tasks which are behind and they were being discussed.  One of the people on the call had a fantastic quote.

Drum roll please…

He said:

“The schedule has slipped but not in such a way as to pertain to the calendar”.

Ummm…I’m pretty sure that the word schedule is pretty well tied to the phrase “a timetable”.  I know because I looked it up in the dictionary and one of the definitions was “a timetable”.  Various others also mention the fact that schedules are tied to time.

So, the math is pretty simple.  Schedule = time.

A calendar = measurment of time.  So, Calendar = time.

So, if time=time then calendar = schedule.

That really only leaves two possibilites:

If a schedule slips – some very fancy quantum mechanics must be in effect to prevent it affecting time.  This is…unlikely.

The second possibility is much more fascinating.  This person actually had the ability and courage to go in front of a group of people (well, it was a conference call, but you get the idea) and tell everyone that just because the schedule had slipped it wouldn’t affect the schedule. 

Now, I accept there are ways to keep things on schedule even if things slip – you can incent workers to move faster, shave a few corners in other places, etc – but the real lesson here is this – the person said this out loud – AND EVERYONE BOUGHT IT. No one questioned the statement at all.

I need this ability.

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