I gave a short presentation in the enterprise 2.0 Management Forum of Future Network today. There were scientists, IT guys, project managers and me as a communications person.
While preparing my speech, I thought of all the bright ideas, highflying plans and cool tools that the audience would learn about on this afternoon.
I looked at my own slides explaining a current and real intranet project and asked myself: "Is this everything it's about? Is this all I can tell?"
The answer, to my own surprise, was quite a proud "Yes."
We need visions and strategies to form a direction, to shape a project and to create something we can stick to as a guideline, if not all details are fixed.
We love to create visions, shape trends, sketch cool features and processes - and then we blame our IT, our suppliers, controllers, maybe even users. They don't get itm, they work to destroy the vision.
This is their job.
Our job, as project executives, consultants or evangelists, is to get things started. And there is only one way to start things: that's by doing a first step. There is no other way. We can attempt to walk faster, to make bigger steps or even to jump into things - but after all, it's just a step, no matter how long the journey will be and no matter where we think we should actually already be.
So I developed a chart I call the frustration- and enthusiasm-diagram and added it to my presentation.

The big peak at the beginning represents our vision and strategies - we plan, talk, discuss, get excited.
The downturn is when senior managers, controllers, it departmens join the discussion. We dont talk about possibilities anymore, we talk about money, technical restrictions, we question if we need all this stuff and if there is any benefit at all.
We may find some benefit, we may agree on some first step that is technically possible, delivers some business value, and fits to our strategy.
This may sound poor.
But if it comes to starting something, there is nothing more we can do. Except: Being ready and open for the next step.