So, today I wanted to share a bit about my run-in with this whole “Chris Ryder” phenomenon. Not the guy himself, you know, but the methods and the whole circus that came with him when he, or rather his ideas, landed in our laps a while back. It was supposed to be a game-changer, or so they said.
It all kicked off when management got this bright idea to bring in some fresh thinking. And that fresh thinking was apparently all bottled up in the “Chris Ryder Approach” to, well, pretty much everything we did. We got a bunch of emails, then some mandatory workshops. I remember sitting there, trying to keep an open mind. Honestly, I did. I figured, okay, let’s see what this is all about. Maybe there’s something to it.
My Dive into the Ryder Maze
So, I decided I’d actually try to implement this stuff. Like, really give it a go on a project I was handling. The first step was trying to even understand the jargon. Everything had a new, fancy name. “Synergy Sprints,” “Momentum Modules,” “Dynamic Feedback Loops” – you name it. It felt like learning a whole new language just to talk about tasks we’d been doing for years.
My daily routine changed. Suddenly, there were more meetings. So many meetings.
- Pre-planning meetings.
- Planning alignment meetings.
- Post-planning review meetings.
- And then the actual work meetings, which were now squeezed in between.
It was a lot. I spent days just trying to map our existing workflow onto this Ryder template. It was like trying to fit a square peg in a round hole, a really, really complicated round hole.
I remember one specific part of his “methodology” involved this super complex charting system for tracking progress. It looked impressive on a slide, all colorful and intricate. But actually using it? A total nightmare. We spent more time updating the chart than doing the work it was supposed to track. Seriously. I’d be up late, not finishing actual project tasks, but fiddling with this chart, making sure all the little boxes were ticked and all the arrows pointed the right way according to Ryder’s rules.
And the “Dynamic Feedback Loops”? Basically, it meant everyone could comment on everything, all the time. Sounds good on paper, right? Collaborative? Nah. It was just chaos. Too many cooks, and none of them actually cooking, just telling the other cooks how to stir the pot according to Chris Ryder’s cookbook. Productivity, well, it kinda took a nosedive. We were all busy “Ryder-ing” instead of, you know, working.
After a few weeks of this, I was beat. The project wasn’t moving faster; if anything, it was getting bogged down in all this new bureaucracy. My team was frustrated. I was frustrated. We were all just going through the motions, trying to follow these convoluted steps that didn’t seem to connect with the reality of getting stuff done.
Eventually, bits and pieces of the “Chris Ryder Approach” started to quietly fade away. The charts got less attention. The super-specific meeting names reverted to something simpler. It wasn’t a sudden thing, more like a slow, collective realization that maybe, just maybe, this wasn’t the silver bullet we were promised. Some parts were quietly dropped, others just morphed into something more sensible over time.
Looking back, I guess I learned a few things. Mainly, that new and shiny doesn’t always mean better. And sometimes, all these fancy frameworks are just distractions from good old common sense and hard work. It was a practice in patience, that’s for sure. And a practice in trying to make sense of something that, deep down, felt more like a fad than a foundation. So yeah, that was my adventure with the whole Chris Ryder thing. Definitely a record I won’t forget anytime soon.
