Your Fantasy or Mine?

I recall a time where I was moved to dig up this aphorism and share it with my colleagues:

Poor planning on your part does not necessitate an emergency on mine.

We chuckled because, naturally, your referred to other people and our planing was exemplary. It took me a minute or two to find a reference^† because in my head the words were these:

Your fantasy is not my emergency.

Which I think I like better because it's more general and snappier.

However...

I'm very conscious that it's easy to sound like a dick when rolling out a quote like these. It feels judgemental and won't move anyone up the team-player rankings, which probably explains why it doesn't get said much.

But not being said doesn't mean not being thought and I've seen people think it a lot about project management, despite understanding that project management can be very, very, hard and that we generally aren't seeing the full picture.

So, PMs, if you'd like people to not think it about you, here's some suggestions based on my own experience on both side of the fantasy:emergency opposition:

be clear and open about your aims and any difficulties you see with achieving them
be available for, and responsive to, questions and give real answers
show that you care about the ground truth of the situation
update people when the aims, or the way to get there, change and explain why
don't assume that "small changes" will "just" be "easy" and "quick"

I say all that with only good intentions but, sadly and perhaps ironically, after criticising their fantasy I fear this one is mine.
Image: https://flic.kr/p/e7oRKe

† I wasn't able to find a definitive source for either quote and, in fact, got no hits at all for the second which makes me wonder whether I might have just coined it! Quote Investigator doesn't have anything to say about any variant of the original, Goodreads attributes it to a Bob Carter (author of "harem fantasy" novels) and this Reddit thread points to a Robert Carter ("a geologist who was paid to promote climate change denial"). Hilariously, I did find a six quid notepad with the quote on the cover that you can "use to write down all the things that people fail to plan about properly." I hope purchasers always have it with them when they need it most.

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