Yes, Project Management can take us to Strange New Worlds and vice versa, ha ha. Well, anyway, “Strange New Worlds” is a beautiful TV show, and we can learn a lot from it. Let’s go!
Science fiction is like a funhouse mirror for society. It takes our present-day anxieties, aspirations, and dilemmas and boom! blows them up in futuristic settings. Some even say that the way a community fictionalizes its many possible futures says a great deal about its present concerns and hopes. The original Star Trek series, with Kirk, Spock, and Uhura, aired from 1966 to 1969. You can draw your own conclusions there. We are far from the America of the ’60s, but heavens know we need some of that optimism back.
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds follows the crew of the USS Enterprise a decade before the original series (Kirk is not the captain yet). The structure is already familiar: each episode features a kinda-sorta independent challenge, and one or more stories span the entire season. The important thing here is that the crew of the Enterprise creates a microsystem that shows us the potential for collaboration, understanding, and talent. Does it ring a bell? Well, it should. Our Star Trek friends are like any other team where people work together to accomplish something. Let’s go!
Oh, some mandatory housekeeping first: this won’t be a thorough Star Trek: Strange New Worlds review. I will just take some pieces of it and highlight how they apply to our PM work. However, If you are spoiler-phobic (I still love you and respect you) and you have not watched the second season (and implicitly the first), it is only logical that you stop reading. Now.
Also, please bear with me, as I am not a huge Star Trek connoisseur. I enjoyed watching re-runs of the original series, and I absolutely love Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, but I won’t call myself an expert here. Ok, now we are ready. Hit it!
The team has a vision and a mission
Space, the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no one has gone before.
This is an exceptionally well-written and effective vision and mission: it succinctly explains the goal, is compelling and motivational AF, and is easy to remember.
Depending on the project/program/product you work with, you won’t be responsible for writing the mission and vision. In any case, you must ensure your project/program/product or even company has one. If you are interviewing, and folks can’t share with you a vision and mission that motivates you, run away as fast as you can (unless you are in dire need of a Mr. Collins, that is).
They work together as a team
Uhura, Spock, Kirk, Chapel, La’an, Ortegas, Una… they all have different functions, but they need to work together to basically not die every other day, lol. Hopefully, the dying thing won’t happen to you, but you can’t escape the collaboration part. Find another profession if you hated group assignments at school.
In Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, we see how Uhura and La’an join the team in the first season and how the entire team must learn to work together. This is especially true for Uhura, as she is the rookie, but they all need to get used to each other, their personalities, quirks, and oddities. Then again, when Pelia joins in season 2, the process starts again as folks get used to her and her eccentricities.
Team evolution is not as evident here as it was in Ted Lasso, when we reviewed the Tuckman model for teams. However, it is still totally applicable: teams form and get to know each other, then storm and fight as conflicts arise, then norm as they resolve conflicts, and perform when they collaborate effectively. I will skip the adjourning part because in Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, it mostly means dying, and I am not in the mood, to be honest.
One super important thing in Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is that crew members come from wildly different backgrounds and cultures. Some were not born on earth, some are not human, and others have endured extreme hardship, which adds a tough backpack to their beliefs and actions. This is totally applicable to our current teams. Yes, we are all humans (mostly, lol), but hopefully, we are also diverse. Different backgrounds mean different ways to see the world, which is always good. Respect and openness go a long way on the Enterprise and Earth.
Balancing hunches and data
Captain Pike tends to rely on hunches and his gut feeling, while Spock, the Chief Science Officer, prefers to rely on data. It is not that Pike ignores data or logic. Being an experienced Captain, Pike is comfortable with that internal voice that tells him that something is not right. In my experience that inner voice often guides us in the right direction, especially when we feel something is not quite right. It motivates us to go that extra mile that, most of the time, makes everything better. Pike is an experienced, fair, and honest leader who relies on data but listens to his hunches and always strives to do the right thing. Always be Pike.
And always be Spock. Lol. I mean, make data your friend. If you don’t have data, create an environment that allows you to gather it. Once you have it, analyze it and use it. Data tells you what the customer does, helps you assess the team’s capacity, shows where the code might be causing problems, and a long etcetera. Data may even support your hunches so that you can make better decisions.
As a science officer, Spock relies on the scientific method, where scientists have an assumption, guess (or hunch?). They formulate a hypothesis, then gather data through experiments and observation to analyze it and see if they can prove it. The scientific method is like a detective game scientists play to figure out how stuff works. They start by watching things closely, guessing how they work, then doing cool experiments to see if their guesses are right (kind of like in RCA, right?). If the experiments give good clues, they use them to solve the mystery and tell us something new about the world.
In our work, we may have assumptions about improving our product to make customers happier. We must prove those assumptions before spending much time and money building those improvements. We may have assumptions about which technical solution is better, so we need to gather data and compare to prove which is better instead of just going with the one that warms our hearts. You get the gist.
Process is often needed
In the first episode of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, we learn about the Starfleet General Order 1 or Prime Directive, a rule prohibiting members of the Federation of Planets from interfering with the natural development of other civilizations. The Prime Directive prevents that advanced technology lands in the hands of civilizations that are not ready for it, avoiding the destruction and chaos that usually follows those kinds of missteps. The First Contact protocol is a process that regulates when and how Starfleet can approach a civilization, revealing they are not alone in the universe.
We need processes and regulations in life and at work with our teams. Their goal is to keep us safe and promote coexistence. I can already hear the hard-core agilists in the room yelling: Montse, the Agile Manifesto says: “Individuals and interactions over processes and tools!”
Yes, don’t kill me, but I don’t think Agile is the end of it all, and even if it was, it doesn’t mean we don’t need processes. Planning, executing, and evaluating are processes, aren’t they? At work, we’ll need to follow guiding principles, rules, and processes. It may be because of compliance, it may be because of security, and it probably is because of stability and consistency. In any case, mind the process, and keep reading!
You can, and should, question processes
Flash forward to the lawyering episode in season two, the one with the trial to decide Una’s future. This would have been my favorite one hadn’t they decided to do a musical episode, btw. Anyway, in this episode, Una faces a trial for keeping her Illyrian heritage under wraps from Starfleet. Why? Well, she was afraid of the whole Federation genetic enhancements ban thing.
I guess this requires a bit of Star Trek history, but yeah, the Federation is super against genetic enhancements, as they led to World War 3, the rise of Khan, and many other horrible, terrible things.
The real point here is how the Federation’s ban totally misses the cultural context, and that’s what’s causing this whole legal wonderful showdown. It’s not just about Una’s freedom but also her job in Starfleet that’s on the line. Sometimes the law is wrong. Remember that slavery used to be legal.
If a process doesn’t make sense anymore, we can, and we should work with leadership to re-think it and improve it.
Ad Astra Per Aspera
Let’s stay in the same episode for a bit (I told you it was almost my favorite). During the trial, Una movingly exposes why joining Starfleet was so important to her. She mentions the motto Ad Astra Per Aspera, which means to the stars through hardship, and how, to her, it is a big shoutout to all the effort humanity put into reaching the stars but also a beacon of hope. When Una was just a little Illyrian kid dealing with all sorts of mess in a split-up Federation colony, she held onto this idea. She figured if she could go through all that tough stuff, she might get to succeed in the stars someday. She took Ad Astra Per Aspera to heart and started picturing a world beyond the fights, united in Starfleet.
Well, anyway, the point here is that projects are often challenging, but we can always reach the stars, or our OKRs, if we work hard.
And also, this is why we needed this new Star Trek in 2023, to believe that if we keep working and fighting for our rights, maybe one day, poverty will be as abhorrent as slavery is today. Ad Astra Per Aspera, my friends.
Communication
Communication is Uhura’s turf, not only because she already speaks almost 40 languages but because she can understand many more. Communication is also a big thing in Star Trek, as Starfleet deals with many different forms of life. So many cool episodes to mention here!
I need to insist that, to me, the relevant thing here is the understanding that comes with communication. Communicating what the team is doing and why is of the utmost importance. Effective reporting is a key part of our job, but I will not talk about that here. I will talk about understanding what our stakeholders, customers, or engineers are telling us and translating it constructively to walk toward our goal.
Let’s see the examples:
In the second episode of the first season, when a comet is about to destroy an inhabited planet, Uhura figures out how to communicate with the form of life seemingly guiding the comet. It is not through words but through music.
Similarly, episode six of the second season shows how Uhura is the only one who hears a certain sound that triggers hallucinations. They are not hallucinations but messages from a form of life that Uhura manages to understand and interpret.
While we may speak the same language in our project world, we don’t always understand what the other means. We do understand what they mean, but do we really understand what they mean? Real understanding is more complex than we think. It is part of our job to be able to understand what a stakeholder needs, what an engineer is struggling with, or what our manager means. This understanding goes beyond words. It comes with empathy, constant collaboration, and experience.
Now that I brought up empathy, special mention to the episode in season one where Spock and T’Pring switch bodies in a very Freaky Friday fashion. Obviously, because of the change, they can understand each other better and figure out some challenges in their relationship. While switching bodies is something we have not figured out yet in project management 😀, we need to always try to put ourselves in the shoes of others. Oh, we can even try to work with different teams for a little while or encourage team members to switch places temporarily. It can be both enlightening and fun (I’ll talk about fun in a bit, by the way)
Before I move on to the very last section (this post is becoming a long one!) I’d like to mention the fifth episode of the second season, where Spock becomes human after a very cool form of life “remediates” him. Communicating with these aliens to turn Spock back to half-human/half-Vulcan becomes challenging because they tend to react in a way a computer would do. If you don’t give them exact instructions, they will misinterpret it and do unexpected things. This reminded me of my QA days and the importance of being super explicit and logical when writing the steps to reproduce and the actual result/expected result. Fun times.
Some STARs and lots of fun
You are already familiar with the STAR method (Situation-Task-Action-Result) if you read last week’s post. I just wanted to mention that almost every single episode of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds follows the STAR pattern: some crew members find themselves in a dire situation, the task is to get out of it alive, they figure out some cool actions, and they execute them, then at the end, they are (hopefully) alive, happy, and they have learned a lot about each other and the universe.
Let’s go to the fun part. Star Trek has a few episodes where they try entirely different things: there’s that episode in season one where the entire crew becomes part of a fairy tale, and they adopt roles they would never have in real life. Then in season two, we have the episode where they play with animation to crossover with the Lower Decks folks. And, of course, we have the very wonderful musical episode right before they devastate us with the season finale.
Two things: 1. experimenting is super cool, and we need to encourage it within our teams because the results can be extraordinary. 2. Having fun when trying new things is vital, and we should always try to have fun in our projects because challenges already come without us asking for them.
I can’t finish this without mentioning how much I love every character in this show and how grateful I am that the Star Trek: Strange New Worlds writers gave Melanie Scrofano more screen time this season (and even some singing). I know you are on strike (and I support you), but if anything happens to her, the wrath of Khan is going to look like a lullaby compared to my reaction. You have been warned.
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