You Can't Please All Of The People All Of The Time

I had cause to use this expression today at work, while a group of us were discussing how to improve Retrospectives. My faint recollection, from my childhood, is that the full quote goes something like,

"You may be able to please some of the people all of the time, and you may be able to please all of the people some of the time, but you'll never be able to please all of the people all of the time."

What's become abundantly clear in my duties as Agile Manager (or AgileMan, as I'm increasingly known) is that I probably can't even do either of the first two propositions! I think there's the aspect that, what works for one person won't necessarily resonate with another. We talked about that today in the context of getting a message out via a work blog, among other possibilities. For some in our company, that approach will hit the bullseye every time. For others, you could have written it in Aramaic and mailed it to Neptune and had the same chance of getting it read on a blog. When one group mentioned awhile back that they didn't follow my work blog because they never remembered to go look at it, providing a super-easy e-mail subscription option, as PeterJ did, seemed like a good solution. Right up until some of those same people then re-directed the subscription e-mails into a separate folder that, one assumes, they'll likely "never remember to go look at." So clearly there's the resonance angle that's going to cause differences in how people react to things that are tried.

Still, I can't help but wonder if another part of the problem doesn't stem from some of what I wrote about, three months ago, which one might call a dubious sense of entitlement. Maybe this is just Cranky Old Man-ism exhibiting itself once again, but how exactly do you please people if they expect every solution to be catered to their exact situation? And I truly get that sense at work some days. People all but come right out and say, "Yeah, that sounds great for some people, but what about me and my very specific case?" Is it simply inconceivable these days to appreciate a compromise solution, or be able to celebrate something that made someone else's life better? Does that qualify as "expecting too much?"

I think a trick-of-the-trade to doing my sort of job and not going crazy is recognizing that you're never going to please even most of the people most of the time. Instead, try to present as many options as you reasonably can, understanding that some people will always complain but most will at least have the opportunity to be happy.