One miniature manager from Uranus

I am toying with the idea of publishing a small business-fable called "One miniature manager from Uranus" which is about conflict management in software development.  It'll be based on my workshop "Customers may be from Mars, Programmers may be from Venus, but how come everyone thinks that Project Managers are from Uranus" where I use a friendly version of Goldratt's evaporating cloud to understand and evaporate conflict between the roles in software development.

I'm motivated by the comments I received after the most recent session, like this one from krystyna, who attended the session:

I saw your presentation "Are project managers from Uranus?" and I like your approach of using conflict calisthenics. This is a very convincing way to show people anatomy of conflict. I would like to use this approach in showing changes in my company not on project management level. I would like to ask you for your permission to use your diagram with acknowledgement of a full credit to you.

Here're my thoughts so far:

The format:

• It will be written as a fable format like one of the "One Minute Manager" series or any of Patrick Lencioni's books (they're good at getting across a few simple concepts), rather than a full blown novel like The Goal or my RollingRocksDownhill. 
• This book will be small but it has to be - all it contains is a very useful took and a few life-changing ideas so it hardly warrents a bigger book.  The one minute manager book, btw,  only has about 10,000 words compared to rollingrocksdownhill which is around 100,000 words.
• I'll blog the book ... bit by bit, and use it as a motivating distraction from my other books.  Multitasking rules!

The story:

• It will probably be set in the future world of software development where Martians rule the commercial universe (and are therefore the customers), programmers all come from Venus, and Earthlings make the coffee. 
• They've just discovered that intelligent life does exist on Uranus and the Uranians just happen to be good at project management.  They're very short.  The working title is, of course a play on the "one minute manager".
• I'm not sure where other roles come from or if Plutonians will play a part given their recent demotion from the brotherhood of planets.

The takeaways ... after reading the book the reader will ...

• The assumptions that I want to get across are that most (a) people - no matter what plant they come from - just want to be good and do a good job and (b) when people come across as being assholes at work they're usually just trying to do a good job but (c) the system is set up incorrectly to put them in conflict with each other. 
• I want to help people to understand the other side's "concerns", that they do indeed share a common purpose and that by understanding the systemic conflict they can then fix the situation.
• The key "take away" will be to use the Conflict Calisthenics approach to tackle conflict.  Using the body parts ("my hands are tied", "one the one hand ... on the other ...", "the weight on my shoulders", "head, heart and gut") seems to be "sticky" and non-threatening. 

But ...

• I may decide this is a silly idea next week or I may even manage to rope in my friend Graeme to co-write with me.

Take a look at the blog at www.miniaturemanager.com for more details.