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Negotiating Scope: An Example
I originally wrote this article in 2007, but I don’t think I ever published it. This is a true story.
“John, we have a problem.”
I really didn’t think this would happen. I’ve made this trip over a dozen times before, from the suburbs to the airport, about 45 minutes to an hour. A little more when traffic is bad. I thought I’d taken care of this before I left, just the way it was drilled in to me as a child, but I didn’t take into consideration the extra bottle of water I’d been drinking late in the day. So much for getting your 8 glasses a day.
It wasn’t clear to me when we would reach the airport. I knew we’d left at about 5:10, and it was now 5:54. On a good day, we’d be there by now, but this was rush hour, and there has definitely been some traffic on the road so far. At some points we were going 60 mph, and at some points closer to 20. At least we hadn’t stopped! I didn’t know whether it would be 5 minutes or 30, but I didn’t know one thing.
“What’s up?” John asked.
“Well,” I started, “I’m not sure my bladder is going to make it as far as the airport.”
I looked at John, and he didn’t appear too concerned yet. All I could do was trust the feeling I learned to trust as a child.
“How long do you think you can hold out?”
Has anyone ever had a good answer to that question? “I don’t know. Not very long.”
John paused, looked around him, considered what I told him, then said, “I read a traffic report before we left. It said traffic would break about 5 minutes from here. If it does, then we have about 15 minutes to the airport. Do you think you can hold on that long?”
An easier question to answer, but the same answer. “I’m not sure.” I thought about it for a while, then John jumped in again.
“The problem is that there’s no place to pull off between here and the airport.” It sounded crazy the moment he said it: all this open road, and no place to stop. I wondered for a moment what twisted mind conceived of the freeway system, but that thought didn’t help me solve my immediate problem.
I weighed my options. I really did not think I would hold out that long, and tension was mounting. “Is there really nowhere we can stop?” I blurted in obvious desperation. “If not, then it’s a good thing I have this bottle in my hand.” A water bottle. It got me into this mess, and it was going to get me out of it.
I laughed when I made the suggestion, but I was serious. Something had to be done. Something about trying to pack 10 pounds of stuff into a 5-pound bag….
Perhaps sensing my pain, John offered, “Well, after the traffic clears up here, we can take an off-ramp to another freeway. After that, there are places it’s at least safer to stop. We should get there in 5 minutes or so.” I felt my shoulders fall back into place. Some good news.
“All right. I think I’ll be OK for around 5 minutes. Much longer, though, and I’m pretty sure I’m going to need the bottle.”
John laughed nervously. I could imagine how he would react if it came to that. I would never have felt so much pressure to urinate accurately in my life. I wondered whether I could pull it off at all. I had to laugh, wondering how many people have had a situation like this come down to their ability to aim, you know, that way.
But still, I was pretty comfortable hanging on for 5 minutes. I suppose 8 wouldn’t have been too bad, but I really didn’t know what would happen after that. All I had were visions of being handed a pretty expensive cleaning bill. I guess it’s good that John had as much at stake as I had in this. Whatever happened, we were definitely in this together.
As John had predicted, traffic broke and we sped up. You can imagine this encouraged me and I felt better. As we came up on “Plan B,” the place I could get out if it came to that, I felt completely in control of myself. I wasn’t comfortable, but I also wasn’t teetering at the brink of disaster anymore. It’s surreal, in a way, but I felt proud at my own ability to control the emptying of my bladder.
How many times have you been able to say that? I couldn’t think of one other time. Strange.
When I caught sight of the airport, I figured I had to wait maybe 5 minutes more, including parking, unloading the car and walking into the nearest entrance. There’s a washroom just inside the door. If I can get to that entrance, the rest is simply–well, let’s call it “execution.”
“You OK?” John asked, as we pulled within a few hundred feet of the parking lot.
“Yep,” I replied. “I think we’re in the clear.”
To spare you the sordid details, the trip ended well. I looked at the water bottle I was holding as I got out of the car, smiled, laughed, cursed it, then headed off to catch my flight.
Afterword
You might wonder how reasonable people could start a serious discourse about planning with such a story–and we want to assure you that every word of it is true, even if the dialog has been paraphrased. This problem did come up, and this story is a faithful account of how we handled it. So why tell the story? It is a prime example of the power of planning based on negotiating scope, an essential ingredient in project success.
What qualifies this exchange as a successful negotiation? John will tell you, quite simply, that his lone criterion for success was, “Joe, you are not pissing in my car.” I interpreted that quite broadly to mean that, whatever we do, I was not to urinate within the confines of his car, nor from within the confines of his car, which included out the window. In the end, in spite of constraints that seemed unworkable, I got to a washroom in time. Was it a false alarm? Certainly not to me at the time. This was no case of crying wolf. While it turns out that we got there in just a shade over 15 minutes, that was only because everything went right. If the traffic hadn’t broken, or something else got in our path, then I would almost certainly have had to suffer the indignity of whipping it out in my friend’s car, not to mention an obvious practical issue. At that moment, bottleneck was no metaphor.
So why was this “project” successful? That is what we’d like to explore in this article. What were the conditions not only for a successful resolution, but even for a successful journey? How did we go from a tense, difficult situation to a calm, orderly, positive result? In short, we did a good job of negotiating scope.
