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The hype cycle, six stages of a project, and more…

Always kicking around in my head is a mis-remembered saying that “the final stage of any successful project is praise of the uninvolved”. This is my misquotation from an old computer science joke. I first met it at least twenty years ago, and etymologist Barry Popik traces it back to the 1970s. It lists the (usually) six stages of a programming project:

  1. Enthusiasm,
  2. Disillusionment,
  3. Panic,
  4. Search for the guilty,
  5. Punishment of the innocent, and
  6. Praise and honour for the nonparticipants.

It is often used as a warning to programmers who think it will be easy to put something together. There is a seven-stage version that begins with “Uncritical acceptance”.

Similarly, and more rigorously, the management consultants, Gartner, came up with the Hype Cycle, invented by VP and innovation expert Jackie Fenn. This looks at how technology gets undue attention early in its development cycle but can be applied, I think, to other projects:

  1. Technology Trigger (or, in my version, the idea that sparks a project)
  2. Peak of Inflated Expectations
  3. Trough of Disillusionment
  4. Slope of Enlightenment
  5. Plateau of Productivity

I like the Hype Cycle, although the pedant in me has to point out that it is not a cycle.

I feel there is another project cycle, a real cycle, yet to be discovered.

  1. Young tyro is brought into organisation to breath fresh life into organisation and have brilliant ideas.
  2. Young tyro has brilliant idea.
  3. Old dogs squash brilliant idea. (“You don’t understand the realities of life here,” etcetera.)
  4. Time passes. Young tyro becomes middle-aged dog. Now has the authority to introduce and enforce a part of his now-old, once-brilliant idea.
  5. The idea is incomplete, sanitised for organisational correctness and expediency, and lacks the sweeping urgency of the youthful whole. It fails.
  6. Old dogs nod wisely, saying that they had been right all the time.
  7. They note also that they are sad to have been proved right because the organisation is in need of fresh thinking.
  8. New young tyro is brought into organisation to breath fresh life into organisation and have brilliant ideas.

References