Serenity Prayer

Maybe you've heard the Serenity Prayer...  

God, grant me the serenity
To accept the things I cannot change;
The courage to change the things that I can;
And the wisdom to know the difference.

Clearly there are religious conotations to this, not least the word 'prayer'. Let's park those, this is not a theology blog. Also, you may know that it is widely adopted by Alcoholics Anonymous as a 'motto'; which, I'll admit, kind of dents it for me, although a fair amount of IT management is done over a beer, so maybe it's not such an irrelevant fact. An internet search will give more origins of the prayer - Wikipedia cites the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr as the author.

Personally, I came across it as the first line on Sinead O'Connor's album 'I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got', and it's stuck in my mind ever since. So, how relevant is it to IT Management? Overlooking the religion of IT Management and the alcoholism that is required... I think it shows an important lesson to Project Management.

Accept the things we cannot change

There are some immovable inevitabilities in project management. Resources. Requirements. Accept the things that cannot change, and make a plan around them. As a project manager, we need to deliver despite the things we cannot control. The art here is to accomodate the things we cannot change, and demonstrate creative thinking in the light of them.

The courage to change the things we can

If the process is broken, fix it. If the requirement is irrelevant, state it. If team members need to change, then change them. Tackle adversity head on, relish in the challenge, and remember that if it was easy, everyone would do it.

And the wisdom to know the difference

Oh yes. Don't fight a war that isn't worth fighting. If the outcome of a decision is not important, don't waste your time tracking it. Think about action and reaction - if it causes more harm than good then don't go there.

However, struck though I am with the simplicty of the message, it causes me some concerns. 'Accept the things we cannot change'. Really? Should we ever accept that there are things we cannot change? There will always be things that are not worth the effort to try and effect the change - but that's different. A team member likes to work in a particular way; you don't like it, it will take a lot of reasoning to change their mind (if, indeed, it's possible to persuade them to change their mind), but ultimately it will get you close enough to where you need to be to deliver what you need. Then accept that; in due course there may be an opportunity to hone their thinking and mentor them. But this is not accepting the things you cannot change, this is accepting that it's not worth changing them.

I propose, maybe arogantly, that there is nothing you cannot change. Or, you should never believe that you cannot effect a change if you needed to. I propose a different wording: 

"to accept the things it is not worth changing" 

Maybe read that as "go with the flow unless you need to stick your or in".