Fergus O'Connell is one of the world’s leading authorities on project management and getting things done. He is the author of eight novels and sixteen business books, including Simply Brilliant, a book about common sense and how to use a power you already have.
In a world where complexity often overshadows clarity, the power of common sense is sometimes overlooked. This article delves into the seven foundational principles of common sense that can help us navigate daily challenges with ease and wisdom. By embracing these straightforward yet impactful guidelines, we can make better decisions, improve relationships, and approach life with a balanced perspective.
‘Common Sense is genius dressed in its working clothes.’ – Ralph Waldo Emerson, American essayist and poet.
‘The trouble with common sense,’ the old saying goes, ‘is that it’s not all that common.’ And in my experience, nowhere is this truer than in work or business, where I have seen very smart people, far smarter than I’ll ever be, propose or do some dumb things.
Of course, it’s easy to say that someone doesn’t have much common sense. It’s such a vague statement that it could mean almost anything. So, a few years back, I decided to try to codify common sense. I would write a book that identified the ‘principles’ (if that’s not too grand a word, though I think it probably is) of common sense. More simply, the book would identify a bunch of things, and if you were doing them or even conscious of them, then you would be exhibiting common sense.
The result was a book called Simply Brilliant. Here’s what one person said about it. It’s been my best-selling book to date and has been translated into more than twenty languages.
Common sense is a skill. It can be learned.
And why would this be a good thing to do? Well, a couple of reasons. The first and most important one is that it gives you a framework for thinking, a sort of mental checklist. If, for example, somebody is proposing a certain course of action project or venture, you can run it by your mental checklist and see if it stands up.
The other reason is that you would stand out from the crowd. In my experience, not a lot of people carry around this mental checklist with them.
So here, then, are the ‘principles’ of common sense
1. Many things are simple
Of course, some things are definitely not simple. Launching, manning, and maintaining the International Space Station, for example, surely have some tremendously complex elements. But most of us aren’t NASA engineers and scientists, and a lot of the stuff we do probably has a simple explanation or solution. So, if you find yourself at a meeting, for example, and the participants are working up some tremendously complex solution to a problem, chances are they’re barking up the wrong tree.
The thing to do then would be to call stop. Ask if there’s not a simpler solution. Ask the question, ‘What would be the simplest solution to this?’ or ‘Can we find a simpler solution to this?’ There’s a good chance you’ll be able to.
2. Know what you’re trying to do
‘If one does not know to which port one is sailing, no wind is favorable – Seneca
You need to know what you’re trying to do. And you need to know precisely it can’t be vague.
This may sound ridiculously obvious but it’s actually been the cause of death of a million projects. Does the word ‘Brexit’ sound familiar?
Another way of thinking about this is with the idea of ‘boxes and clouds.’ What you’re trying to do has to be a box. It has to be well-defined. You have to know what’s inside the box and what’s not. What are you trying to achieve [‘in scope’ inside the box], and what are you not trying to achieve ‘out of scope’ outside the box?
If you don’t have a box, you’ll have a cloud. Then, you have no real idea what exactly you’re trying to do. If you don’t know, then neither will other people. Such a situation is guaranteed to end in tears.
3. There is always a sequence of events
This is how everything gets done. Knowing the sequence of events in advance is called a plan. Knowing them while you’re engaged in figuring them out is called firefighting. Knowing them after the fact is called a post-mortem. (Or often a disaster.)
I hope you’d agree that firefighting is dumb. I hope you’d further agree that trying to figure out what happened after everything has fallen apart is completely dumb. That leaves planning as the only option left standing.
If you want to plan anything, if you want to estimate the time something is going to take, the number of people you need, and the cost or budget, you need to figure out the sequence of events.
There’s more on this here.
4. Things don’t get done if people don’t do them
I know this sounds ludicrously obvious, but there are a vast number of (especially) bosses out there who believe that work can be done without people. These are the bosses who say things like ‘That’s just the culture here’ or ‘I don’t want to hear anybody using the word “can’t,” or ‘We like a can-do attitude here’ or ‘You’re going to have to learn to do more with less’ or ‘You should be working smarter, not harder [whatever that’s supposed to mean] or ‘You’re being inflexible’ or ‘You’re not being a team player’ or ‘Is this plan based on a five day week?’ or ‘You’re lucky to have a job’ or ‘We have no choice we have to do it’ or ‘That’s not the kind of attitude we want around here’ or ‘We want can-do people here’ or ‘I don’t think you’re suited to the culture of this organization.’ In short, there have to be people to do the work or the work can’t be done.
5. Things rarely turn out as expected
In 1920, the US enacted prohibition laws to suppress the alcohol trade. It was felt that this would be good both for the nation’s health and for public morals. Put more simply, there would be fewer men drinking their wages, fewer drunken men beating their wives, and neglecting or abusing their families.
On the face of it, it might have seemed like a good idea. Certainly, American legislators and temperance crusaders thought so.
The result, of course, was that many small-scale producers of alcohol wineries, brewers, and distillers immediately went out of business. And if that wasn’t bad enough, large-scale organized crime set up a vast illegal alcohol industry.
Things rarely turn out as expected.
So, you need to have a contingency in your plans.
You also need to do a risk assessment. This is just a fancy way of saying that you need to do the following:
Make a list of all the things you can think of that could go wrong with the venture you’re proposing to undertake. These are the risks to your project.
Grade each of these things as to their Likelihood, i.e., how likely they are to happen. Use a scale of 1-3. 1 is Low, 3 is High, 2 in the middle.
Grade them again as to their Impact and the effect if they do happen. Use the same 1-3 scale. 1 is Low, 3 is High, 2 in the middle.
Now multiply the Likelihood by the Impact. For any items that end up rated a 6 or a 9, identify some actions you can take to reduce or eliminate these risks.
6. Things either are or they aren’t
The cause of a million project failures. The terrifying ‘we’re 90% done’ syndrome which generally means that 90% of the time has gone rather than 90% of the thing has been done. Something is either done or it’s not.
Break the project or venture down into the sequence of events, essentially, the list of jobs to be done.
Now, the way to track progress is for each job to exist in only one of two states. It’s either done (and hence, you’ve made some progress), or it’s not done (and so you haven’t made that progress.)
7. Look at things from others’ points of view
The so-called ‘Golden Rule’ ‘Do as you would be done to.’ Look at Wikipedia and prepare to be astonished by the number of civilizations and religions that this has been and still is a part of.
In all of your working life, you’ll have to deal with people. Sometimes, you may have difficult decisions to make that will affect people. You may have a bewildering variety of choices open to you and possible paths that you could take. In those circumstances, it can be very enlightening to put yourself in the shoes of these other people. How will they view each choice that you might make? And, in turn, how will this affect your decision-making?
US President John F Kennedy invoked the Golden Rule in a famous civil rights speech delivered on 11 June 1963. This is what he said:
‘The heart of the question is whether all Americans are to be afforded equal rights and equal opportunities, whether we are going to treat our fellow Americans as we want to be treated [my italics]. If an American, because his skin is dark, cannot eat lunch in a restaurant open to the public, if he cannot send his children to the best public school available, if he cannot vote for the public officials who will represent him, if, in short, he cannot enjoy the full and free life which all of us want, then who among us would be content to have the color of his skin changed and stand in his place? Who among us would then be content with the counsels of patience and delay?’
So, there it is, common sense. Try looking at your job / work through this lens for a few weeks and see what happens.
Read more from Fergus O'Connell
Fergus O'Connell, Novelist, Project Manager, Teacher, Speaker
Fergus O'Connell is one of the world’s leading authorities on project management and getting things done. He is the author of eight novels and sixteen business books, including Simply Brilliant, a book about common sense and how to use a power you already have.
He founded his first project management company - ETP - in 1991. His disruptive, common-sense project management method, The Ten Steps, has influenced a generation of project managers. In 2003, this method was used to plan and execute the Special Olympics World Games, the world’s biggest sporting event that year. Fergus’ new company, Fast Projects, is again disrupting the project management space by focusing on speeding up projects / shortening time to market.
