This dovetails with a book (sent by friend Rodney Brim):  Charles S. Jacobs’ Management Rewired, which is often misconstrued to say that  feedback does not work.  Rather, it’s how the feedback is surfaced and then communicated.    (In the end, it’s more of whether the feedback and goals are “organic” – reinforcing the point that we should ask questions, rather than simply cram our own answers down the organization line – though, of course, this is premised on having the time and Socratic skills.)

The common denominator? Neural scientists have substantiated that emotion is the driver of decisions, not the mechanical, rational mba process: in order for me to make a true decision, a true shift, first I must own it, then I must feel an emotional need, a pain, really,  to do so.  “Objective” reasons often really come afterwards, to shop for the solution (or, for many of us,  to justify the purchase to the wife).  Emotion is from the latin emovere – to move away from: to relieve the pain, the itch.  Emotion also always involves the “I” – all politics are local.

We need emotion to make fundamental shifts, but we also need to not leak the emotional drive by merely talking about it.

So here we are, September:  a perfect time to pause and look back, cast away, and cast off.

Getting from A to B on a straight line.   On that premise, project management sets out to map all the steps and linkages along a timeline.  But project management itself has become so involved there’s  a high priesthood of professionals certified by the PMI.

Consider that over 80% of the PMI curriculum is focused on the planning phase, with a mere one sentence referring to execution – and that, only as a dispatching function.  (Koskela  et al.: The Underlying Theory of Project Management is Obsolete, PMI 2002 ).   It is no surprise that last year saw a major overhaul within the PMI, self- confessedly to fix a growing irrelevance to day-to-day managers.

Absolutely,  the more complex the interdependencies and sequences in a situation, the more necessary it is to pre-plan.

However, as the project moves into implementation, PM’s very own complexity  collapses unto itself.  Why? Reality doesn’t follow our plans.  As the daily operations involve more and more external factors, delays, and uncertainty,  it becomes harder to maintain the convenient tidiness of the GANTT chart.  Ask a roomful of blackbelt six-sigmas how many  are able to keep the GANTT operational through the end of the project.

The GANTT  is invaluable as a planning reference point, but it isn’t going to be your daily management tool.

As decision-making moves upward in the organizational hierarchy, there’s increasing complexity.  Consider that a study of chief executives attributed failure to failed execution, and not to lack of plans or resources.   We’ll come back to this point shortly.

The primary tool for PM has always been Microsoft Project®, which has co-evolved with the PMI curriculum.  Essentially, all events and resources are planned along a timeline: that in itself is faultless.  But here lie the two main fallacies.  One, the software defines “issues” narrowly as scheduling-related .  Two: it does not have an inherent mechanism for feedback loops.

That the world, thanks to electronic media and global interconnectedness, is increasingly complex and fast-changing, is the executive’s new reality.  It is less and less about engineered certainty, and more about shorter, faster OODA loops .   A project management tool must have a built-in mechanism for enabling real-time updates and redirections;  Microsoft Project® does not.

Ironically, the MS Project® development team had to go outside of its own tool to track issues.

“ Expect the unexpected. In the course of its own work, Capossela’s team came upon the central truth of collaborative work: Most projects are derailed by unexpected problems that thwart what looked to be an on-time, on-budget operation.

As part of its own internal operations, the team often uses a homegrown database that it has dubbed Raid. Like the canned product of the same name, it is meant to help find and kill bugs — in the code — and keep them from multiplying.

When it came to working on its own project, the team appreciated the value of Raid. “Keeping our eye on those bugs — those issues — was just as important as getting something finished on time, if not more important,” says Todd Warren, who served as Project’s program manager before Capossela…” – Fara Warner, in Fast Company.

Microsoft has not been able to step back far enough to rethink its own Project® in a larger context.  Fortunately, there are other tools out there more suited to strategic implementation that also inherently allow tracking with updates and redirections.

The real problems tend to be the soft and fuzzy which are not apparent from the GANTT – and a lot of fuzzies are people-related issues.  But that’s real life, and cannot be ignored just because they do not tidily lend themselves to simple timelines of events.

Strategic planning and execution must be even more quickly adaptive as the situation spirals out to include more external factors.

Years ago, Bossidy and Charan reminded us to ask what really matters.  Your world needs a ruthless Pareto 80-20 trimming more than ever.  Your staff planners should develop comprehensive GANTT maps; but,  very quickly, for this fiscal year, what  five or seven deliverables will define your success?

In summary:

1. Project management ( as embodied by the PMI curriculum and its co-evolved tool MS Project®) painted itself into a corner of impracticality by overemphasizing planning  in itself.

2. The day-to-day management reality is that it’s a process within a complex, and ever faster changing context.

3. Managers need tools with information-and-correction  loops to track and drive what really matters.

Scheduling is not the issue, as MS Project® might want to define it:  rather, scheduling  issues are the end result of the fuzzies  - typically things outside your scope, resources, authority and tidy timelines.

1. Do your style and tools communicate an openness to disagreements or even just different ideas?
2. Do the team members think you only want content to fill a predetermined
   structure? Or do they think you expect to pick up something from them
   you might not have even known to ask?
3. At the other extreme, did you abdicate leadership by abandoning them to an amorphous “collaboration” dumping site?
4. How does the organization maintain separate perspectives? Who’s looking at external threats and opportunities; who’s conserving  internal resources? Or are you a perfectly self-sufficient one-man band?

The pair of tools I consistently recommend to clients are (a) a mind mapping tool ; and (b) a database with a tabular outlining interface.

• Mind mapping is a terrific tool when I’m faced with an unfamiliar or a complex situation. It’s simply the best way to explore and parse out the elements. The emerging map captures the natural relationships and logic.
• A database is essentially a multi-dimensional spreadsheet. Anyone who, in the early spreadsheet days, laid out a three-year financial projection on a single sheet should quickly appreciate what life could have been to have a “box” where you could dump data any which way in any whatever order – and then have customized interfaces with those data filtered and sorted just so they match exactly the user’s perspective at that time.
  

Edward Tufte, widely regarded as the dean of graphical representation of quantitative data, believes that a table ( x rows, y columns) is the most effective way to present relationships for up to 500 data points.

I have found Tufte’s recommendation to hold true in client situations ranging from a small start-up, to a mature $25Bn multi-timezone organization. In brief, mind mapping is good for exploratory discussions, like getting to fly overhead and gaining a 500ft, 10,000ft, etc. vantage point.

Once we pick the best logical fit from that mapping, we move the data into a table that “linearizes” (shows the sequential relationship). The rows and their subrows, with progressive levels of indentation, would still quickly show the logical relationships. The columns could show the time-sequential data. Another page might use the columns to display current values, or alerts instead.

Picking the right form does enhance the communication function .

A quick segue here. (OK, a WIDE lateral here…) I would often remark how the practical American sensibility is reflected in the plain orange-brick box forms of the last several decades’ shools and government buildings. Quite consistent with the direct, plain spoken American style, compared to, say, the French who always round out their corners and syllables. Look at the typical trailers hauled by our landscapers, with angle bars just butt-welded and left exposed.

I have wondered how we affect the sensibility of younger people when we are all on a first-name basis: an informality that I am sure gives younger people a sense of being on equal footing with the older authority – not a bad thing for encouraging a vigorously innovative sensibility.

I wonder, too,  what’s lost when schools are simply an orange brick saltbox, windowless for security purposes, displacing the earlier culture when you looked up to the schools and schoolteachers, as you ascend up broad steps to ornate twelve-foot double doors that open to a tall foyer and sweeping staircases going up to the balcony and its mural backdrop?

Doug Johnson’s blog talks about school designs. His emphasis is on the human factors and their probable impact on the students and faculty’s sensibilities. Doug ponders the closed brick boxes and asks, “Might one not expect graduates of this school to think in straight lines and exhibit one-right-answer mentalities?”

In 1987, the “system accident” came from not realizing how computerized trading,  scaling up into programmed trading, would vibrate into a collapse.  In 2008, we were all surprised at the extent and speed of the financial collapse;  again we failed to see the next larger scale of complexity, underestimating the downside of tightly intertwined global systems.

So,  how do you know when you don’t know?

This series targets three topics (decision making, strategic execution, and project management).  You will also find links to thinkers, books, tools and other resources.

Looking at the recent years’ book releases, we see a shifting from rigidly closed decision and management models, to open-ended approaches and analytical tools. Why?  Information now floods us; it’s a faster flux of events, and reactions from a global pool of players.

Dilemma of Project Management

Recall that Microsoft Project and the PMI BOK co-evolved in over 20 years, back when organizations were localized with simpler markets and competition.  MS Project still narrowly defines “issues” as scheduling.  Ironically, the more detailed the GANTT chart, the less likely it can be maintained for day-to-day management.

Management modeling’s  roots are in manufacturing whose processes tend to be linear and determinate.  We  dismiss messy “unquantifiables”.  But complexity and the change flux may not allow methodical analysis.   Newer product life cycles are shorter and discontinuous.

Irony of Making Decisions in a Surplus of Information

Closed “rational” analyses need to be supplemented,  and perhaps not by another model, but an approach, plus shorter decision feedback loops. Think of a stance, rather than a stand:  aligning to the most strategic goals, alert to changes, updates, and collaboration.

“What’s measured is what gets done,” true enough, but often it’s what cannot be measured that may render a plan undone. We forget that straight lines and metrics are human devices. Nature neither draws straight lines, nor follows our plans.

System Reliability and Accidents

With the internet and globalization, has come an unprecedented complexity.  With complexity,  some say,  “system accidents” are a certainty.   Do we step back enough for a larger context,  searching for what we don’t know that we don’t know. Until the the 2007 financial collapse, risk was a matter of actuarial hedging.  Perpetual motion  powered by technology and optimism:  the 1987 market’ “system accident” from programmed trading was a distant lesson.  Until the “lightning victory” in Iraq,  war was a matter of technology and logistics.

This blog series, then, is a search for ways to see the grays and not merely the binary; and for clearer values to navigate to, as goals must be ever more adaptive.