“Have you ever been in a meeting towards the end of a project when a person who has not been to any of the preceding ones comes up with a ‘small feedback’ that impacts everything?” Swami asked us the other day over coffee.
Jigneshbhai flashed a smile and I knew what was coming. “Did someone like that come to your meeting last week?” he teased.
“Yes. And it turned out that no one else said anything to him, not even Raichand,” Swami reported.
“Who was he, must have been one of the bosses?” Jigneshbhai remarked.
“Everyone including Raichand was wondering who this person is.”
“And it turns out that he was someone senior?”
“Yes!”
“And someone problematic?”
“Yes!”
“And someone who can be a spanner in the works?”
“Yes – someone from IT – not from Raichand’s direct hierarchy – but senior enough for him to not say anything.”
“Like a distantly related uncle?”
“Yes!” Swami said, and both Jigneshbhai and I broke into a loud guffaw.
I knew very well that it was late feedback that requires a lot of what has been done to be changed. I had once come across a senior editor who told me that the plot needed an extra character after the second draft was ready and approved for print by the junior editor.
“This IT person had a ‘small feedback’- he said,” Swami continued. “That the system we had built can’t move to production till we gave it to him in a particular format. We had no idea what that format meant.”
“And as if that was not enough, in that call – which was supposed to be the last call – another senior manager, who had been absent so far, turned up. He tried to appear familiar with the project and asked a stupid question after this IT guy – about this format.”
Swami seemed fairly disturbed with the turn of events on a project we knew was dear to his heart. He had told us about it. We knew he and his team had spent serious time and effort on it.
Jigneshbhai, as usual, found this hilarious. He never understood how Swami and his corporate settings always found themselves in these kind of situations. So he laughed at it and cracked some joke. Sometimes his jokes help, sometimes they don’t.
“This is like the grand-uncle who turns up one day before the wedding, and then asks for changes in the menu,” he said. Neither me nor Swami laughed – me mostly due to Swami’s mood. But the mood did lighten a bit. So Jigneshbhai continued.
“Or this lady we had on the group tour we went on a few years back – do you remember?” he asked us, while we stretched our memories.
“Do you remember she insisted on going to a new place because she saw something on Instagram while the itinerary had been fixed few weeks back. And she had no qualms about it!”
Jigneshbhai smiled as Swami and I remembered the nut case.
Everyone meets these late feedbackers in life. The ones who don’t want to do the hard work of working on something but want to feel like they have something to say, just when everything is done.
And then blame everyone for not being flexible, or agile or open to feedback or adaptable.
Jigneshbhai fell silent for a while after that. It did help lighten up Swami’s mood a bit. So then I asked, “So what did you do about what the IT guy and that senior guy said?”
Swami looked up from his coffee morosely. “What can we do? We set a new deadline and agreed to do some part of what they wanted. The rest of it they will have to do themselves after the project ends,” he replied.
“Fair enough. Can’t do much beyond that I guess,” Jigneshbhai mused. “With this kind of late feedback.”
“But why don’t they ever turn up early on?” Swami asked. I could feel his pain. This time even Jigneshbhai seemed to empathize with Swami.
While we were lost in thought, finishing our coffee, we saw the wealthy old man from the sprawling bungalow inch up towards our table. “We need feedback, we can change, but we don’t need it too late,” he said. “Even if the late feedbacker is someone important.”
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