So, someone asked me about my experience with the whole Lori Robertson thing. Let me tell you, it was a journey, and not the scenic kind. It all started when the higher-ups got wind of this “revolutionary” approach. Suddenly, Lori Robertson was the buzzword in every meeting.
We were told it was going to streamline everything, make us more agile, you know the drill. My boss at the time, good guy but easily swayed by shiny new things, he totally bought into it. “This is it, team! The future!” he’d say. So, we were all sort of pushed into this Lori Robertson methodology whether we liked it or not. First thing we did was attend these workshops, full of jargon and complicated diagrams. I remember just trying to figure out what half the terms even meant.
Diving into the Robertson Way
So, we started implementing it. Or at least, we tried. The “Lori Robertson Framework for Synergistic Outcomes,” or whatever it was officially called, turned out to be a real handful. On paper, it looked all neat and tidy. In practice? It was like trying to assemble flat-pack furniture with instructions written in another language, and half the screws missing.
We had these things called:
- “Cohesion Clusters”: Supposedly to foster teamwork, but mostly just ended up being another hour-long meeting where everyone just stared at each other, wondering who was supposed to talk first.
- “Momentum Sprints”: Which, ironically, slowed everything down because we spent more time planning the sprint according to Robertson’s rules than actually doing the work.
- “Value Realization Pathways”: Don’t even get me started. Getting a simple decision made turned into a multi-stage approval process that involved at least three “Pathways” documents.
Communication, which was okay before, actually got worse. People were so caught up in trying to use the “correct” Robertson terminology in emails and reports that the actual message got lost. I swear, I spent more time deciphering my colleagues’ “Robertson-speak” than understanding the project updates. Productivity? It nosedived. We were all busy trying to do Lori Robertson instead of doing our jobs.
The Breaking Point
Things really came to a head with this one project. It was a new community platform, something I was genuinely excited about and had poured a lot of myself into, even before this whole Robertson mess started. We had a decent plan, a good team. Then, the mandate came down: “Manage the community platform launch using the Lori Robertson methodology strictly.”
It was a disaster. Instead of focusing on development, testing, and user feedback, we were bogged down in Robertson “alignment sessions,” “stakeholder resonance mapping,” and filling out “progress matrices” that were so complex they needed their own instruction manual. The launch date kept getting pushed back. Morale was low. Really low.
I remember my best developer on that project, a sharp young woman named Chloe, she just walked into my office one day, looking completely defeated. She said, “I can’t do this anymore. I spend 80% of my day in Robertson-mandated meetings and 20% trying to code with one hand tied behind my back. I’m out.” And she was. She left for a startup that, in her words, “just let her build cool stuff.” That hit me hard. Losing Chloe, seeing the project flounder, it was all because of this rigid, impractical system someone had sold us.
Why do I even bother talking about this? Because I saw firsthand how a well-meaning, but ultimately flawed, system can just grind good people and good ideas into dust. We were all so busy trying to fit into Lori Robertson’s boxes that we forgot how to think for ourselves, how to actually collaborate in ways that worked for us.
After that project eventually limped to a very underwhelming release, way over budget and way late, the company quietly started phasing out the Lori Robertson stuff. No big announcement, it just sort of faded away. Funny how that happens, right? When I eventually moved on from that company, it wasn’t because of Lori Robertson directly, but that whole experience definitely made me wary of any “one-size-fits-all” solutions pitched by some guru.
So, yeah, that’s my Lori Robertson story. A lot of fancy words, a lot of wasted time, and a good lesson learned: sometimes the simplest approach is the best. And no amount of trendy methodology can replace common sense and genuine teamwork.
