Hi folks,
I’ve been itching to go watch the Black Panther movie, but with a small baby in the house, it’s been hard to carve out enough time.
I’ve read some of the reviews, and they’re almost universally glowing from both critics and fans alike. But other movies sometimes generate divided opinions – critics vs fans, critics vs critics, etc… Which made me curious about how critics do their job.
It turns out that the foundations of theater/film/art critics were established a few hundred years ago by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Aside from having an awesome name, Goethe was one of the world’s last true renaissance men, making a lasting impact in literature, science, politics, and more. One of his many contributions was through his love of theater, and his proposal that a critique of a play should answer the following three questions in order:
- What is the playwright trying to do?
- How well has he or she done it?
- Was it worth doing?
The order was important to Goethe. He wanted critics to avoid rushing to personal judgement – “I didn’t like it, so this wasn’t worth doing” – and instead try to understand the perspective of the artist first, forcing them into relatively objective analysis.
Um, maybe.
Either way, I like the approach. But on the production side, we need to rearrange the order. When we’re talking about new security initiatives, it becomes something like:
- What are we trying to do? – What’s the idea? What ends or change are we trying to accomplish?
- Is this worth doing? – Is there a compelling need for us to undertake this new effort? What benefit does this bring to our stakeholders?
- How well can we do it? – Do we have the necessary resources? How can we measure our success? What is our stakeholder’s perspective?
As with Goethe’s original list, the order is important. Before we undertake any new initiative, we should have very solid answers to the questions “what are we trying to do” and “is it worth doing?”. All too often we get excited by a new idea and skip over the second question, failing to truly assess if it’s an idea worth pursuing. It’s easy to be blinded by the excitement of a new idea and the default position most of us have – that of course our ideas are worthwhile! But that’s not always the case.
And that’s not the end of our analysis. Once we objectively conclude that something is worth doing, we need to determine if we can actually do it. Do we have the right resources? Is the timing right? Are we the right people to do this?
If we pause and really examine the re-ordered Goethe questions, we’ll likely find that some of our ideas, while novel and interesting, aren’t likely to affect the change we want and, thus, aren’t worth doing. Or maybe they’re incredibly awesome, but we simply don’t have the necessary resources. And if we abandon those ideas early on, we can reallocate our resources to initiatives that are more likely to have a positive impact and we’re more likely to successfully complete, making us all the more effective.
That’s right, Dorothy. Goethe would have liked your thinking.
Rex