7  Caring For Your People

the most important part

• Projects end, but relationships between people do not have to
• The people who depended on you will be hit by multiple shocks at once (just like you)
• Acknowledge that shutdown is a loss, even when it was voluntary
  • Team members who spent years on a project deserve to have that recognized

7.1 Total Pain

• Total pain is used to describe how a dying patient’s suffering is never purely physical (Saunders 1963)
  • It has physical, psychological, social, and spiritual dimensions that interact and amplify one another
• Project closure similarly involves more than logistics
  • Team members experience professional identity loss, grief over unfinished work, anxiety about career prospects, and sometimes guilt or anger that can fracture long-standing relationships
  • Treating closure as a purely administrative exercise leaves people worse off and makes it harder for the broader community to learn from the experience

7.2 Psychological First Aid

• (Hobfoll et al. 2007) identified five principles to guide responses in the early stages of a crisis, which became the basis of the WHO’s Psychological First Aid field guide (Organization 2013)
  1. Promote a sense of safety
  2. Calm the emotional environment
  3. Build self-efficacy and collective efficacy
  4. Foster connectedness
  5. Maintain hope
• The practical translation for project teams is that the first conversations after a closure announcement should not be about logistics
  • Confirm that people are not in immediate danger
  • Acknowledge what has happened rather than minimizing it
  • Remind people that they have handled difficult things before
  • Connect people with one another rather than leaving them to absorb the news alone
  • Identify what is genuinely uncertain versus irreversibly decided
• Sometimes you have to be “honest enough”

7.3 Two Kinds of Coping

• (Lazarus and Folkman 1984) distinguishes two types of coping
• Problem-focused coping addresses the situation itself
  • Adopted when people perceive a stressor as controllable
• Emotion-focused coping addresses the person’s internal response
  • Adopted when people perceive it as uncontrollable
• Abrupt project closure typically combines both
  • So team members will respond to the same event differently depending on whether they feel any agency over it
• The person who immediately starts triaging data is not more competent than the person who needs an hour to absorb what has happened
  • They are applying different coping modes to the same situation
• Managing closure well means making space for both responses simultaneously.

7.4 Grief and Its Timing

• (Rando 2000) studied anticipatory mourning: grief that begins before an expected loss, not after it
  • It involves simultaneous processing of past losses (what the project once was), present losses (what it is becoming), and future losses (what it will never be)
  • It is cognitively and emotionally more demanding than grief after the fact because the person must continue to function while still engaged in the thing they are losing
  • Planned shutdown triggers this in project teams: people must continue doing the work of closing down while processing the loss of their work relationships and the future they had imagined
  • Naming this dynamic explicitly helps people manage it and support one another
• (Shepherd 2003; Shepherd et al. 2016) found that the intensity of grief after a failed venture is proportional to personal identification with the project and directly interferes with the ability to learn from the experience
  • Grief recovery is not linear and is not accelerated by forcing lessons-learned conversations too early
  • Structured reflection is most productive after a period of acknowledgement, not immediately after the loss
  • A retrospective held a month after closure captures more than one held the week it closes

7.5 Practical Care

• Downstream users and contributors deserve advance notice proportional to their dependence on the project
• Help community members find each other independently of your infrastructure: a mailing list or forum they control survives your shutdown
• Teams that maintained social contact after shutdown were more likely to reform and continue work; those that dispersed without ties were not
• Engineers assigned to maintain a cancelled project suffer serious morale damage
  • Do not trap people in this role longer than necessary
• People often feel liberated rather than bereft when a long-running obligation ends
  • Give yourself and others permission to experience this without guilt
• Writing about difficult experiences has documented benefits
• Small acts of recognition (naming achievements, thanking contributors publicly) matter disproportionately during difficult transitions
• A goodbye ceremony, however small, marks the ending and helps people move on
  • Closing a project is not erasing it
• The continuing bonds theory of bereavement (Klass et al. 1996) challenged the idea that healthy mourning requires severing the relationship with what was lost
  • People who maintain an ongoing connection through story-telling, souvenirs, or integration of the lost thing’s values are exhibiting a normal, healthy form of grief
  • Framing closure around what continues, rather than only what ends, reduces distress and lets participants frame archiving, citation, and attribution as genuine acts of preservation, not bureaucratic compliance

7.6 Exercises

7.6.1 Mapping Stakeholder Messages

Using your project:

1. List the people and groups most affected by closing your project, in order of impact. Include both declared dependents (e.g., packages that list you as a requirement) and undeclared ones (e.g., researchers who download your data).
2. Categorize each by impact severity if your project disappeared tomorrow: critical (their work stops), significant (their work is impaired), or minor (an inconvenience).
3. Draft a one-sentence message tailored to each category. What lead time does each group need, and what alternatives can you point them to?

What information appears in all messages, and what appears in only one? What differs in tone, level of detail, and lead time given?

Hobfoll, Stevan E. et al. 2007. “Five Essential Elements of Immediate and Mid-Term Mass Trauma Intervention: Empirical Evidence.” Psychiatry: Interpersonal and Biological Processes 70 (4). https://doi.org/10.1521/psyc.2007.70.4.283.

Klass, Dennis, Phyllis R. Silverman, and Steven Nickman, eds. 1996. Continuing Bonds: New Understandings of Grief. Taylor; Francis / Routledge. ISBN 9781560323396.

Lazarus, Richard S., and Susan Folkman. 1984. Stress, Appraisal, and Coping. Springer. ISBN 9780826141910.

Organization, World Health. 2013. Psychological First Aid: Facilitator’s Manual for Orienting Field Workers. https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/psychological-first-aid.

Rando, Therese A., ed. 2000. Clinical Dimensions of Anticipatory Mourning: Theory and Practice in Working with the Dying, Their Loved Ones, and Their Caregivers. Research Press. ISBN 9780878223800.

Saunders, Cicely. 1963. “The Treatment of Intractable Pain in Terminal Cancer.” Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine 56 (3): 195–97.

Shepherd, Dean A. 2003. “Learning from Business Failure: Propositions of Grief Recovery for the Self-Employed.” Academy of Management Review 28 (2). https://doi.org/10.5465/amr.2003.9416377.

Shepherd, Dean A., Trenton Williams, Marcus Wolfe, and Holger Patzelt. 2016. Learning from Entrepreneurial Failure: Emotions, Cognitions, and Actions. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9781107569836.