When to Step Off the Dance Floor: A Project Manager’s Balcony Moment

If you’ve ever facilitated process workshops, you know the feeling: sticky notes everywhere, lively debates, deep dives into exceptions, edge cases, and “what if” scenarios.

It feels productive. It feels collaborative. It feels like progress.

And yet, recently, I realised I was spending a little too much time on the dance floor.

I’m currently managing a project aimed at streamlining, harmonising and automating processes as a first step toward introducing a new system. We are in the process-mapping phase, running workshops to capture how things work today and validate them with stakeholders. The energy in these sessions is high. People are engaged, discussions are rich, and every process seems to uncover three more.

As a project manager, it’s easy to get pulled into the momentum.

Each workshop feels like a step forward. Each new diagram feels like clarity.

Until you step onto the balcony.

During a recent planning session for our first steering committee, I suddenly realised how deep we were on the dance floor. We were investing enormous time refining process maps, discussing details, and polishing flows.

Meanwhile, the real goal of this phase is not to create perfectly detailed future processes. The goal is to understand requirements for the tool and the scale of the change ahead.

From the balcony, the pattern became obvious: the team was naturally drifting toward perfection. Process mapping is tangible and safe. Requirements and change impact are more ambiguous. So we kept dancing where the music felt familiar.

Leadership required a shift in perspective.

From the balcony, three things became clear:

1. We risked over-mapping and losing time before the steering committee.

2. We needed to keep stakeholders aligned on the purpose of this phase.

3. I had to start looking ahead to the next phase—functional analysis and tool selection.

That balcony moment changed how I stepped back onto the dance floor.

I began reframing workshops with clearer boundaries: What do we need to know for requirements? What is “good enough” for this phase? What can wait? Instead of encouraging deeper detail, I started encouraging sharper focus.

At the same time, I initiated demos with potential tools. Some might say it was early. But from the balcony, it made perfect sense. Seeing what tools can do will help us avoid designing processes in a vacuum and prepare the team for the next phase.

This experience reminded me that project management is not just about facilitating the dance. It is about constantly moving between the dance floor and the balcony:

• On the dance floor, we engage, facilitate, and move the work forward.

• On the balcony, we reconnect with purpose, timing, and direction.

Spend too long dancing, and you risk perfecting the wrong thing. Stay too long on the balcony, and the project loses momentum.

The real work lies in the movement between the two.