But the fruit of the spirit is love, joy,
peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith...
        The Epistle of St. Paul to the Galatians

 

 

 

    The Spiritual Life of Projects

I have received more mail on this topic than all others put together.  
From college professors to college students, from CIOs to programmers,
 from Canada to Iran.  
It seems to have hit a nerve.

The concept is simple: there are four dimensions to human behavior:

•     Physical:            such as running a marathon race

•     Intellectual:       such as balancing your check book

•     Emotional:         experiencing anger or frustration

•     Everything Else: everything that isn't physical, intellectual, or emotional

 

 

I chose to call "everything else" the Spiritual aspects of people.  That is, the aspects of the spirit of people.  I believe that this is
both the source of our true creativity, is what makes our profession truly meaningful, and is the real determining factor in productivity. 
I have seen projects that were not comprised of the very best intellects be highly successful, and teams staffed with superstars that
crashed and burned.

We spend enormous amounts of effort and attention on the intellectual and the physical.  We spend some small effort on the emotional. 
I believe we spend very little time and effort on the dimension that really counts: the spiritual

Since project teams are built of people we have to optimize the spiritual aspects of our teams. 

This is really not all that surprising.  In any system development, we must optimize the system to the processor.  In this case the
"processor" is a collection of humans and the spiritual dimension of humans is arguably our most important characteristic.  
 

The Spiritual Life of Projects