Embrace Your Cognitive Bias

Cognitive Biases are distortions in the way humans see things in comparison to the purely logical way that mathematics, economics, and yes even project management would have us look at things.

The problem is not that we have them… most of them are wired deep into our brains following millions of years of evolution.

The problem is that we don’t know about them, and consequently don’t take them into account when we have to make important decisions.

(This area is so important that Daniel Kahneman won a Nobel Prize in 2002 for work tying non-rational decision making, and cognitive bias, to mainstream economics)

I suppose in some small way Beaufortes (my consulting company) is trying to do the same with project management. People don’t behave rationally, they have emotions, they can be inspired, they have cognitive bias! Tying that into how we run projects (project leadership as a compliment to project management) can produce results you wouldn’t believe.

You have to know about them to guard against them, or use them (but that’s another article)... So let’s get more specific. After the jump, let me show you a great list of cognitive biases. I’ll bet that there are at least a few that you haven’t heard of before!

 

Powerpoint woes...

I admit it, I am a communications geek. I love seeing artful communicators bring stories to life, grab an audience, and change the world.

Compare business communications with ‘consumer’ communications, and you’ll see a gap like the grand canyon…  but every once in a while you see a presenter that bridges that gap, and gives a business orientated presentation that you would probably enjoy even if you didn’t have to see it.

My two favourite examples? Funny you should ask!… read on dear reader..

Seth talks about "The vibe"

Seth Godin (marketing / business guru and author) posted a small note on his blog last week about “The vibe”.

‘Engagement’ is another word that many are using for the same phenomena. In fact this concept however it’s packaged seems to be getting some real traction with our corporate clients at the moment.

Project management methodologies don’t touch it, and most corporate handbooks won’t go anywhere near it. (Even Seth acknowledges that it sounds ‘flaky’)

But when you walk into a team, a company, a project that has ‘the vibe’, you can smell and taste it. The world of business has changed, and those that are ‘engaging’ their employees and have ‘the vibe’ are kicking the ass of the rest of the grey wage slaves out there… don’t believe me, take a look at the hard facts.

— Jason Bates

Tags: Seth+Godin, Project+Leadership, vibe, engagement

The Clearest message

An interesting quote from a US pastor on “church leadership”, Via The Leadership Now blog.

"Here's an incredibly important principle. You cannot communicate complicated information to large groups of people. As you increase the number of people, you have to decrease the complexity of the information. Congregational rule, when you're trying to make a complicated decision, works against the principle. So consequently, the guy with the microphone and the clearest message always wins. The most persuasive person in the room is going to win. Whether right or wrong."

How right he is. Recently I’ve been working with a senior exec. in a large multinational on his communications strategy for a large programme of work. When I first met him I asked him what the key messages he wanted to put over to his staff were.

After the first 10 minutes of his answer I knew that we had a way to go…

It did actually get a lot easier when I explained that his messages should be consistent course corrections rather than an explanation of the art of navigation. As with large oil tankers, you can’t steer small turns on a large programme, you have to keep things big and simple, know where you are and where you want to go.

–– Jason Bates

Tags:  "leadership+now", "church+leadership", communications, project+management

Oi! You've been poking my friends...

I can say without a shadow of a doubt that Facebook is the new big thing in professional networking.  I signed up while researching an earlier blog piece, and I’ve started to receive friend requests at an increasing rate.  It blur's the line between the wildly successful social networking site MySpace, and the wildly successful (but oh! so frustrating) professional networking site, LinkedIn.

I think that the big difference between Friendster and LinkedIn is the inclusion of a photograph…it sounds trivial, but you get a totally different scale of reaction to finding the picture of a friend, than finding the name of a friend.

There is another huge reason:  Its underlying technology allows other companies to write applications, using Facebook as a platform.  For a detailed analysis of the pro’s and con’s of this approach, have a look at Marc Andreessen’s blog (He founded Netscape, so he knows a thing or two).

One of the quirky aspects of Facebook is the idea of “poking”.  Apparently you can just poke people, and then they are informed you’ve poked them.  And you can see your friend’s friend’s pictures.  I wonder if it’s safe.

— Philip Greenwood (Your Open-networking Project Leadership Friend)

Tags:  Facebook, Professional+Networking, Networking, LinkedIn, Social+Networking

Stone Soup

The old fable of “stone soup” is an interesting allegory for project leadership of all types.

Creating a frame for collaboration, the main heroes make something out of nothing, beat the prisoner’s dilemma, and through the power of telling a curious and surprising story, forge an outcome that would not have occurred if they had started with a purely factual explanation of what they were doing.

But I’m getting ahead of myself…

Change Management Isn't a Methodology!

A few years ago I worked on a project with a client (global, ~140,000 people) that had an in-house change management methodology.  I expected that this would make the job easier – after all, they must recognise the value of change management and know how to use it, surely. 

I was astounded to discover that very few people in the company knew how to apply the methodology – I found nobody who even knew where to start!  After hours of studying the methodology I figured out why:  There was no starting point. I was just a cluster of loosely connected tools.

Subconcious Impressions

In this video clip, Derren Brown creates a brilliant demonstration of how receptive we are – unconsciously – to subtle cues. While you watch the clip, bear in mind what people may be perceiving about your projects by the subtle messages you and your team communicate…

— Philip Greenwood

Wikis finally go WYSIWYG

Sourceforge.net, the open source development platform, has announced that all of their projects are going to have wikis available to them – this is a major advance because so few of these projects have sufficient documentation – actually many have none at all!

Sourceforge’s user community numbers in excess of 1.5 million people, so their choice of wiki is quite a big deal.  The obvious choice seemed to be Mediawiki – the tool that powers Wikipedia – because Mediawiki is well proven and is open sourced itself.

But Sourceforge has gone with Wikispaces.  I took a little time today to review the Wikispaces offering and I’m quite impressed.  The key benefit of Wikispaces is usability: It has a WYSIWYG editor (more like writing in a word processor), so unlike Mediawiki, you don’t have to learn any codes.

Will this mean the end to the empty wiki syndrome?  Does this make the wiki a usable project tool?  Well try it out; there’s a free, hosted, advert supported trial option!

— Philip Greenwood

Tags: Mediawiki, Wikispaces, Wiki, Sourceforge, WYSIWYG

How to Add Impact to your Presentation

Avoid Powerpoint…

The Gettysburg Powerpoint Presentation.

I particularly liked the inclusion of the speaker notes on the last page.

My thanks to David Gurteen for pointing this out.

— Philip Greenwood

Tags:  Gettysbury+Address, Powerpoint, Presentation, Abraham+Lincoln