6 ways to stop project management from killing creativity

Have you ever made the head of a programme manager spin around? I recently told a client that his team didn’t need anymore ‘creativity training’, and that what was holding them back was too much project management...Woah!

Aghast, (well I had just killed a sacred cow in his office)… he wanted to know more. Could the way he was brandishing PMBOK and PRINCE2 across his programme really be preventing his team from performing at their creative best?

Calming him down, I told him that his beloved methodologies were of course important in making sure this large and complex programme was well co-ordinated, managed, and monitored... but there were 6 changes he would have to make if he wanted the team to be creative as well!

1) Set some unreasonable goals!

When we are running programmes we of course want to set sensible goals that add up over time to deliver a sensible end result. Well as they say, necessity is the mother of invention, and reasonable goals kill creativity dead.

Ask me to improve a process by 5% and I’ll tweak it. Tell me that I have to improve a process by 50%, and that’s when my creative juices start to flow.

Unreasonable goals encourage your staff to ask questions about the most basic assumptions in your business.You’ll never do better than the target you aim for… so aim high… don’t you feel a slight buzz just thinking about bigger challenges?

2) Take it less seriously!

When you’ve got millions riding on a large programme, often the tone set by the programme manager is “don’t fail!”, but control too tightly — with all the project management techniques at your disposal — make it too serious, and there is a massive degradation in the performance and creativity of any team.

Even the standard project nomenclature “dead lines” and “critical path” speaks of the utter seriousness of what projects do…  but make a project life or death, and you force everyone into the most conservative courses of action possible, which are rarely optimal.

So when the success of a project does mean life or death for a company , you need to find a way of turning it into the big challenge, a cup final… not a fight for survival. You would be surprised at the number of project managers who never understand this!

3) Give the project documents some juice!

Project management documents are on the whole factual, cold, and logical. Specifications rather than inspirations; but inspired people are the most creative. It’s with an inspired team that you get your big wins, and next promotion!

The descriptions of documents in PRINCE2 and PMBOK tell you what must be there from a logical rational perspective, but they don’t specify that you must make them grey and lifeless… that is something we’ve learnt to do ourselves!

Give your project documents life, inspire your team, and you’ll unleash their creativity!

4) Don’t fill every gap in the plan!

Good project leadership is about creating a meaningful ‘what’ an emotional ‘why’, and then helping your team work out the ‘how’ for itself.

Project management methodologies can push teams to plan the smallest details of their projects before the team really understands the problem. It’s nice to feel the certainty (however misguided) that a complex integrated Gantt chart on the office wall can give you… but great project leaders are much more comfortable dealing with real uncertainty than new project manager PMP graduates (who might be tempted to fill uncertain gaps with hopeful plans according to their methodology of choice). Remember, creativity happens when there are gaps to fill!

5) Bring the end goal nearer!

I’ve seen programme plans that stretch 3–4 years into the future. It’s very difficult to get your team to be creative and motivated over such a long period of time. So great project leaders find a route to their goal that includes useful and meaningful destinations along the way. It might seem like an indirect route to the final destination, but everyone is much more motivated and creative about getting to the next 3 month goal than they would be a 3 year goal.

As anyone who has planned a long car journey will tell you, the fastest and most enjoyable route is rarely a straight line between A and B. Project management is all too often about taking that straight line! Project leadership adds some extra dimensions to the planning problem that frequently produces more interesting routes.

6) Accept less compromise!

Compromise is reasonable. Creativity is unreasonable.
Project management is reasonable, project leadership frequently not.
Set standards high, accept compromise a little less and ask for creativity a little more.

— Jason Bates