Planetary Enlightenment as a Group Project

Since my business background includes an extensive and intensive stint as a consultant to major, multi-national corporations, I thought I would introduce some tried-and-true business methodology here.

First, let me explain why I feel that this is important…

I’ve taken Thor’s invitation to join and administer this pod deep within my heart. I have chosen to adopt “Planetary Enlightenment” as one of my spiritual projects. Since I consider it a project, I’d like to approach it with the same type of forethought and planning that I have employed on other projects on which I have been engaged. To me, this is one of the most important projects I will have participated in within the course of my lifetime; more important than successfully implementing enterprise-wide systems, more important than maximizing worker productivity, more important than optimizing shareholder wealth.

Project Planning 101
To successfully embark upon, and complete a project, a tried-and-true methodology I’ve employed uses the acronym SQERT which stands for:
- Scope
- Quality
- Effort
- Resources
- Time

When I came across Zaadz and began exploring this community and all the functionality currently at our disposal, I was pleasantly ASTOUNDED. What a great vision! What a great mission! What a great group of people I was meeting each day as I made my blog contributions and explored the discussion threads on various pods….

Clearly, in my mind, Quality is self-evident. And the open forums by which to engage with the Zaadz team to continually explore ways to improve the site and functionality means, to me, that Quality Assurance is in the hands of the current population. I believe that that is a very good thing.

It’s important to note, in the SQERT model of project planning, when you fix any one of the variables, you automatically put constraints on the remaining four; e.g., if time is a fixed quantity (as is often the case on business projects), then scope, quality, effort and resources are constrained.

The beauty of the current Zaadz paradigm is that Scope, Effort, Resources and Time are not constrained at all. Since Quality is what we, as Zaadzsters, are co-defining at the moment, we have no limiting variables.

I’d like to explore in this space, i.e., this particular discussion area, what it means to begin to define some of our terms. Is it possible to get a group of co-creators (co-project managers if you’ll permit me) to agree on what the Scope of our project is?

Re: Planetary Enlightenment as a Group Project

Dear Nishtha,

This is beautiful. Now that you have explained your business background I understand your quiet competence better!

One of the discussions we've been having in Zaadz ambassadors is around the fact that social networking can lead to burnout and dropout, and how we can help avoid that here on Zaadz.

Though I agree that in the aggregate time and energy are boundless, in practice for each of us as individual zaadzsters they are not, and herein lies the rub. People start in, get enthusiastic, join a bunch of pods, stop being able to keep up with discussions, have some difficult connections or lack thereof and… get discouraged.

There are tons of pods but the vast majority have been abandoned by their planter and original participants… the problem is not that everything doesn't grow, this is the nature of things, but the planters often get disaffected - they interpret the “lack of interest” in their pod as rejection of them as people, and many of them leave zaadz. I have seen this happen a number of times.

I believe the focussed approach you propose is part of the solution.

Love,

Nicole

SQERT

Love it, thank you for the well spoken food for thought!