If you want to know everything about running a project then you can do no better than to ask Oor Wullie. I’ve been telling this story quite a lot over the last few weeks as it seems to be more and more relevant. I just hope it’s actually true. I think it is but then my memory isn’t that great any more.
For any of you who have never heard of Oor Wullie here is a brief synopsis: Oor Wullie is a character in a comic strip published in the D.C. Thomson newspaper The Sunday Post. He is drawn with blonde spiky hair, dungarees and is often drawn sitting an upturned bucket. Wullie’s gang is made up of Fat Boab, Wee Eck, Soapy Soutar and Primrose Petterson and, unsurprisingly, they get into various kinds of mischief much to the chagrin of Ma and Pa, his parents and the local bobby PC Joe Murdoch.
Anyway, back to the story. It all starts when Wullie has a problem to work out as part of his homework and, being a comic strip character, he’s not very good at maths. The problem is one of those where if it takes one man to dig a hole of a certain size you have to work out how long would it take him to dig a much bigger hole. I’m sure you’ve had to grapple with such a mind bender when you were younger. Of course he is unable to work it out no matter how hard he scratches his head and so he decides to resort to a bit of practical help.
He grabs a shovel and goes out into the garden and digs the requisite hole that one man digs in the prescribed time and everything goes to plan. So far so good and so he starts to dig the larger hole but then his Pa comes out and asks Wullie to go down to the shops to get him a packet of fags (it was some time ago!). He puts down the shovel and runs his errand and then gets back to his mathematical digging. After a little while an ice-cream van comes around and of course our hero gets distracted and eventually stops his work to have a cone. By the time he has managed to dig the larger hole and come up with the amount of time it has taken he is, of course, hopelessly wrong. The story ends with him sitting on his bucket having been told off by his teacher and him uttering his famous catch phrase ‘help ma Boab’.
So what is the moral of this story and what has it to do with running a project? Two things really: Firstly, when you set out to do something, no matter how hard you plan it life is going to get in the way and; Secondly, after more than forty years the tale is still inside my head and so if you want to get a message to stick, tell it as a story.
I still hope it’s actually true.
Thoughts from a Guerrilla Worker 