Project Dogma?

I saw on a blog somewhere a couple of interesting definitions that have been cropping up in my thoughts recently.

Methodology + Mindlessness = Dogma

Methodology + Mindfulness = Excellence

How many project methodology graduates have been taught to use a hammer, and then see nails everywhere? In fact they lose the ability to see anything else!

Do you see your project through the filters of the methodology you are most familiar with? Can you see your project outside of these filters? What fresh insight might this give you?

- Jason Bates (I'm back)

Tags:
methodology, Project+Management, Perception, Dogma

Volunteer Armies

I just found out that Adam Curtis’s 4 part documentary “The Century of the Self” is available to watch online (1, 2, 3, 4). Cool! It’s a little preachy, but it does tell quite an amazing story of how Freud’s psychological principles were first put to effective corporate use by his nephew Edward Bernays.

We take it for granted that emotional selling has been around for ever, attaching sexy women to big cars, and hunky builders to diet coke, but before Bernays there was none of this. Advertising was… well… just informational. If I wanted to sell you a pair of shoes I would tell you about their specification, and leave it at that.

When I look at how most large corporations communicate internally with their project teams, it’s like we are in a time warp, I see today what was common place in advertising 100 years ago, purely informational communication. We fully acknowledge that when dealing with consumers we have to ‘market’ to them, create brands, and excite them with images they can identify with, and aspire to.

… but talk about employees and just because we are paying them a wage we get lazy, and think that there is no need to engage or sell to them. They work for us, we just need to tell them what to do… don’t we?

Flo Radio

Do you work from home?  Sometimes it can be wonderful, and I get heaps of work done. Other times, even when home alone, I find it quite easy to get distracted (I suspect I still get more done than when I’m in the office).

In one of those distracted moments I started wondering what I could do to have more of the “flow” moments – the good ones.  I’ve had a study at home for many years, so it’s pretty established and comfortable, to my mind – although my fiancee calls it “the man room”.  

I realised that the ambiance could be improved, so I did some research: What kind of sounds could be used to help concentration?

Then, using the wonderful Pandora Radio Internet site, I created a radio station for “flow” music – you can share it too, with this link: Flo Radio. It may not be your music preference, but if you keep it quiet, it chugs along nicely in the background, and it seems to have the desired effect.  If there are tracks that you find intrusive to your work, just tell Pandora you don’t like them, and it’ll optimize for you!

— Philip Greenwood

 

 

Tags: Flow, Radio, Work+from+home, Achieve+more

Flo Radio

Do you work from home?  Sometimes it can be wonderful, and I get heaps of work done. Other times, even when home alone, I find it quite easy to get distracted (I suspect I still get more done than when I’m in the office).

In one of those distracted moments I started wondering what I could do to have more of the “flow” moments – the good ones.  I’ve had a study at home for many years, so it’s pretty established and comfortable, to my mind – although my fiancee calls it “the man room”.  

I realised that the ambiance could be improved, so I did some research: What kind of sounds could be used to help concentration?

Then, using the wonderful Pandora Radio Internet site, I created a radio station for “flow” music – you can share it too, with this link: Flo Radio. It may not be your music preference, but if you keep it quiet, it chugs along nicely in the background, and it seems to have the desired effect.  If there are tracks that you find intrusive to your work, just tell Pandora you don’t like them, and it’ll optimize for you!

— Philip Greenwood

 

 

Tags: Flow, Radio, Work+from+home, Achieve+more

Guarantee Project Success 2

I suggested in my previous blog piece the idea that a powerful definition of a project would be:

“A project is the way that an organization takes a risk”.

I think this is powerful for several reasons:

1. It’s universal – it doesn’t matter what type of project you’re running, you invest resources with the intention to capture value.
2. It formally acknowledges uncertainty – every project has it, but most teams are in denial about the extent of it. For instance, enterprise transformation projects are very often a process of discovery, rather than the execution of a set of pre-defined steps – yet I seem them planned-out like concrete projects all the time!
3. When you take risks you continually assess alternative outcomes for merit. These are “real options” and they have positive inherent value.
4. It creates a tacit permission to consider course changes during the project if new outcomes are perceived.  The selection of these outcomes would still be considered success!
5. A thorough consideration of project domain complexity will reveal that we tend to vastly over-simplify our approach to them.  The definition suggests the proper appraisal of the project’s complexity is necessary.
6. It embeds the project within the organization, and the portfolio of changes that are occurring inside it and in its external context.

It’s unusual to discuss risk-taking, rather than risk-management.  Most project management tools are risk management tools, focusing on minimizing risk for a single course of action, a single outcome.  Risk taking is another art entirely.

I’m sure I’ve got more to say about this subject – until next time!

— Philip Greenwood

Tags:  Project+success, Project+failure, Risk+management

“Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge”

This quote is from Charles Dickens, and it relates to my favourite ‘find’ of the week, a study in which psychology catches up with Mr Dickens’ intuition.

I’m talking about the Dunning-Kruger effect, the phenomenon wherein people who have little knowledge think that they know more than others who have much more knowledge.

…and you know, the more I thought about it, the more I realized how interesting a problem it is for organizations. Unless a problem domain is explored within a team, there will always be a sub-optimized crossover point at which the more knowledgeable / skilled people in a group are  overwhelmed by the more ignorant / confident contingent.

I’ve also got a suspicion that there is some kind of link to the confidence / competence profiles of American presidents in there as well…  :o)

Have a great weekend!

—Jason Bates

Tags:  Dunning-Kruger, Ignorance, Project+Leadership
wikitags : [[wiki:beaufortes:cognitive_error]]

Today's Instant Advice

Yesterday a senior exec. told me that the predominant cognitive style for his organization was ISTJ. (If those letters mean nothing to you, check out this quick explanation of the Myers Briggs Type Indicator)

It reminded me of this text file I’ve had floating around my PC for years. Instant advice for particular cognitive styles. I think that you’ll find this interesting if you know your predominant cognitive style, or that of your organization…

Team Decision Making: There's No Good System!

Looking at Jason’s posting on Cognitive Bias, I find myself inspired to write about team decision making processes.  Why?  It seems to me that the people who are cerebral enough to internalize the implications of this list are also unlikely to be the talkative or assertive ones in meetings.

Here’s a summary of the categories of team decision processes:

Team Decision Making: There's No Good System!

Looking at Jason’s posting on Cognitive Bias, I find myself inspired to write about team decision making processes.  Why?  It seems to me that the people who are cerebral enough to internalize the implications of this list are also unlikely to be the talkative or assertive ones in meetings.

Here’s a summary of the categories of team decision processes:

The above average project team

Reading back through my post on cognitive bias. A couple of items from the list stood out for me as being interesting to consider with respect to how we think and see projects, and project leadership.

The Lake Wobegon effect (You know that you’ll be quoting this later), is apparently named after a fictional US town where everyone is above average. This is quite appropriate for a cognitive bias that’s probably best demonstrated with an example

“The swedish researcher Ola Svenson found that 80% of drivers surveyed rated themselves in the top 30% of all drivers.^[1]”

For a variety of attributes including fairness, virtuosity, luck, and investing ability, most people apparently believe that they are above average.

So my question is this, if this holds for self-assessment of ‘project delivery skills’, how might this affect someone’s ability to budget, and forecast the length of time taken for particular tasks?

… in my experience, many project managers do indeed believe that not only they, but their entire team is better than average, and consequently can shave budget and time off of recommended plans.

(Is there a “Project Wobegon Effect” that people can be prepared for?)

Does this tally with your experience too?

—Jason Bates

Tags: Lake+Wobegon, Project+management, cognitive+bias

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!

 

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.

Brain Lessons

Do Project Leaders need to understand the way brains work?  When I read Brain Lessons I was surprised how many of these neuroscience authors  focussed on, or displayed compassion – often self-compassion.  Is compassion a leadership quality?  Ask the Dalai Lama!

Since I’m fond of saying that “you can’t learn Project Leadership from a book”, I’ve copied another comment that focussed on learning below:

Daniel Levitin, author of This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession.
I spend a lot of time in my job learning new things, and I spend a lot of my leisure time learning how to play new pieces on the piano or guitar. What I know about the brain has changed my life by teaching me that with learning, "slow and steady wins the race." A few minutes of practice each day is better than several hours all at once, once a week, because of the neurochemical and neurodynamic processes involved in memory consolidation. I also know that practicing—whether it's a new Bill Evans solo or cracking a multivariate differential equation—is best done every day at the same time.

I was also very interested in this comment, regarding our ability to problems solve:

David Linden, author of The Accidental Mind: How Brain Evolution Has Given Us Love, Memory, Dreams, and God.
The brain is not a generic problem-solving machine—rather, evolution has shaped it into a strange edifice that is very proficient in dealing with a particular subset of problems.

—Philip Greenwood

Tags:  Neuroscience, Cognition, Leadership, Dalai+Lama, Compassion, Mind, Brain

How Rational Are We?

Many valuable project team behaviours have, at their core, a requirement to accept ambiguity for extended periods. For instance, a project leader must simultaneously reconcile an unshakable confidence that the project will succeed with the recognition that their team, being only human, are flawed in their beliefs, research techniques and decision making processes. 

A Repetitive Voice can Sound like a Chorus

Project Leaders need to commuicate influentially… Here’s a recent study from the American Psychological Association that shows how the opinion of a single person, communicated repetitively, becomes accepted as a common belief.

Synopsis:  http://www.apa.org/releases/popularopinion.html

Full Paper: http://www.apa.org/journals/releases/psp925821.pdf

—Philip Greenwood

Tags: research, article

Just Rewards

I saw an interesting quote on Alexander Kjerul’s great blog: Chief Happiness Officer…

“One of the most thoroughly replicated findings in the field of social psychology states, the more you reward people for doing something, the more they tend to lose interest in whatever they had to do to get the reward.” - Alfie Kohn

An animal trainer friend told me that when she works with dogs that annoy their owners with random barking, she trains those dogs to bark on cue (using  rewards)… and then never gives the cue to bark.

Pow!… No more barking!…. think about that for a moment.

What does that say about incentivisation of the work environment. Let’s say that you have a new knowledge management system that you want your department to use. You decide to incentivise its use with some great rewards, and for a time it works really well! Congratulations! Now… what happens when you stop the initial reward scheme?

No more barking ;o)

— Jason Bates

Tags: Kjerul, Happiness, training, motivation, incentivise

How Visible Is Your Project?

I believe that the vast majority of projects are not nearly visible enough, particularly among the extended stakeholder and customer groups, though I’m constantly under fire for holding this opinion.

The reason teams don’t like visibility, as far as I can tell, is that we humans – in general – like to hide what we perceive as risky behaviour.  We do it as children, and the instinct doesn’t disappear.  (Though once we’ve got the trick mastered,  we’re quite happy to show it to the world to impress them with our daring – just watch the skaters on the South Bank in London).

Global Warming and the Cynefin Framework

Ever since meeting Louisa-Jayne O’Neill of the UK Cabinet Office at one of David Gurteen’s knowledge cafes, I’ve been interested in the Cynefin Framework.  Ms O’Neill wrote an insightful article about the interaction of faith and decision making with respect to the Bush presidency, and that was to be my introduction to the framework.

The Cynefin Framework, proposed by Dave Snowden, helps us understand the nature of knowledge as it relates to different types of situations, and different approaches to decision making in those situations. The space in the middle of the diagram reflects an area of decision making that is affected by faith, or to use a more subtle term a “predisposition to belief”.

On a plane ride to South Africa recently, I watched Al Gore’s documentary film about Global Warming – An Inconvenient Truth.  For two weeks I was a convert; image going on your first safari, thinking “all this will be gone in 30 years”.  I watched the film again on the return flight and, guilt ridden, discussed it with everybody I saw on my return.  Gore’s arguments seemed so compelling; his simple, at times personal, approach to conveying his messages was convincing.

She should have music (wherever she goes)

In 1982, Gerald J. Gorn conducted an experiment in which subjects saw pens of one colour while hearing pleasant background music, and pens of another colour while hearing unpleasant background music.  Later on, the subjects were offered a choice of pens and – you guessed it -they tended to pick the pens that had been paired with the pleasant music.

This phenomenum is known as associative conditioning, and it is used extensively by that most influential of industries, Advertising. Next time you look at an advert, pay attention and you’ll notice that products are associated with humour, particular colours, select music, sexual innuendo and smiley attractive people having good times.  (Go ahead, you can associate these things with us, if you like.)

So what has this got to do with project leadership?  Well, I’m not going to recommend “Eye of the Tiger” as a project theme tune, or even to propose that you are as flagrant as I have been with the pictures in this blog, but I do want to point out that the stake-holders for your project (your team members, sponsors, governance group, customers etc.) have all got those same, sophisticated, “association engines” between their ears that the advertisers use without asking…so maybe you should have a careful look at things like:

• The environment your project teams meet and work in -what does it say about the importance of the project?
• Your use of colour, humour, pictures, multimedia, language, formats and fonts in your communications.

Ensure that they all align to give all your stake holders very positive associations with your project.

Philip Greenwood

Tags: associative, conditioning