Take a Tip from The Emperor’s New Clothes and Increase Project Confidence

We’ve all been there. The meeting is droning on. Some project or idea is being hashed out yet again…. and the whole thing doesn’t sense. It’s disorganized and you think it’s a bad idea. It doesn’t even seem like it would work! Isn’t anyone going to say anything? You look around.  Some people are nodding in agreement. Some are taking notes, or pretending to. You think to yourself, is it just me? But hey, you’re the new guy or gal. Or the youngest. Or the oldest. Surely someone else will raise their hand and just blurt out what you’re probably all thinking, right? Someone else will ask that obvious question. “I’ll just wait for so and so to ask,” you think, but the meeting ends, and everyone files out. 

So here’s another obvious question that few of us dare to ask: do you trust yourself? The truth is, it’s kind of rare. 

Consider the story of The Emperor’s New Clothes. Everyone’s heard it. The emperor: so into himself and his own image. So obsessed with new clothes and showing them off. He doesn’t even manage his kingdom. So when the two “weavers” come to town, supposedly able to weave magical clothing that is invisible to people who are profoundly stupid or unfit for their office, the emperor can’t resist.

As the story goes, the emperor himself is unable to see the cloth on the looms. Suddenly, his deepest fears rise to the surface as he wonders, “Am I profoundly stupid?” A better question would have been, “Do I trust myself?”

Instead, he tasked his most trusted advisors to report on the progress. Unfortunately, they too were so consumed by their fears of appearing stupid that they didn’t tell the emperor the truth: there was nothing there to see.

Now comes the part of the story where a couple of veteran Pathorians, Relevance High Priestess Marcy and Process Princess Sarah, travel back in time and are hired as consultants to the emperor.  So where do we begin? We hardly have to go past the R in the RELEVANCE model. 

To be fair, the emperor’s advisors did take the first step of reviewing some of the empirical data (no pun intended). They understood the situation correctly, there was nothing there to see, but they simply did not trust their own experience enough to be of any usefulness. They were waiting for someone else to raise their hand and point out the obvious.

Luckily, Marcy and Sarah would have done this, and could have pointed out some rather obvious latent obstacles for the emperor as well:

He was too focused on his image to realize he wasn’t running his court properly.  

• He was full of self-doubt and insecurity, constantly seeking external validation, and trying to expose foolish people in his kingdom.  
• He had surrounded himself with people who did not feel empowered to speak the truth.  
• The emperor’s trusted ministers were so conforming and self-doubting that they had only their own best interests at heart, and were ultimately of no service at all to their emperor.  
• The weavers were unvetted swindlers.    

The path to RELEVANCE begins with learning to trust yourself. When you believe in yourself, you bring your authentic self to everything you do. No one wanted to be the one to tell the emperor that he’s walking down the street naked. But just remember, when a kid finally yelled out that the emperor had no clothes on, the rest of the kingdom fell in line pretty quickly. They were all thinking the same thing.