Ten Project Management Fallacies - Chaco Canyon Consulting

Ten Project Management Fallacies: The Power of Avoiding Hazards

Presented to Northern Utah Chapter of PMI by Richard Brenner Principal, Chaco Canyon Consulting on May 12, 2015

Who said this?


It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.

presented to

Northern Utah Chapter of PMI

2015 Professional Development Conference

• Attributed to:

BYU Conference Center, Provo, Utah May 12, 2015

• Will Rogers • Mark Twain • Josh Billings (aka Henry Wheeler Shaw) • Charles F. Kettering • Satchel Paige • Yogi Berra

by

Rick Brenner Chaco Canyon Consulting Building State-of-the-Art Teamwork In Problem-Solving Organizations

Copyright © 2015 Richard Brenner

[email protected] www.ChacoCanyon.com

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1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

• Some widely held beliefs about teamwork and project management are false • Some widely held beliefs are true only sometimes • We use these beliefs to make plans and policies • That makes trouble • We can do better and avoid hazards if we know what these beliefs are Some widely believed “principles” of management and project management are just not so

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The The The The The The The The The The

Fallacy of Positivism Bad Actor Fallacy Naturalistic Fallacy Culturalistic Fallacy Fungibility Fallacy Linearity Fallacy Normative Fallacy Availability Heuristic Grandiosity Fallacy Invulnerability Fallacy

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Adobe Reader 6.0 or later is required

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1.

The Fallacy of Positivism

If we believe we can accomplish something, we’re more likely to actually accomplish it

• Underlined items are live links to articles on my Web site or elsewhere • To get a copy with working links, download: http://goo.gl/OVvHGn • To get a copy of the handout, download: http://goo.gl/WYTIuT • To get both as a zip archive, download: http://goo.gl/GIPrLH

And inversely:

Please let me know as we go along if you want to ask a question 3

Copyright © 2015 Richard Brenner [email protected] Chaco Canyon Consulting www.ChacoCanyon.com

• See the essay by Bob Kalsey

The ten fallacies

Core message

A note on format

Mark Twain

The Little Engine That Could, by Watty Piper

If we express doubts about accomplishing something, we’re less likely to actually accomplish it

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Positivism: Fantasy and the reality

Bad actors: Fantasy and reality • Blaming a single individual is tempting:

• Especially tempting to leaders motivating teams to do the impossible • A tool of manipulation

• Suggests dealing with that individual is enough • No need for messy and expensive team interventions • No need for involving more than one person • No policy, nobody outside the team, is responsible

• Stifles dissent • Compels acceptance of unsafe working conditions

• A realistic view is always preferable

• A more realistic view:

• Be positive when it’s appropriate • Express doubts when they’re real and relevant

• A single individual can keep a team dysfunctional • More typically many individuals contribute to team problems

Both staying positive inappropriately and expressing doubt inappropriately can lead to catastrophe

Team performance is an attribute of both the team’s system, and the organization that hosts the team

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Indicators of the Fallacy of Positivism

Indicators of the Bad Actor Fallacy

• Phrases you may hear • We expect you to be a team player • People look up to you—we need you to lead them • Let’s not have any nervous nellies or naysayers on this now • We can’t create a backup plan. That would be like saying we don’t believe in Plan A.

• Some risks must be removed from the risk plan • “Cheerleaders” are regularly given more responsibility than they can handle

• Someone is “dinged” on performance review because he or she is a “difficult person” • Someone is sent to a “communication coach” to learn how to get along better with others • Someone is reassigned to a solo task because of “difficulties getting along” • Never implicated in team troubles: • • • •

Managers’ decisions and behavior Behavior of any person outside the team Organizational policy Any factors external to the organization

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2.

The Bad Actor Fallacy

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3.

The Naturalistic Fallacy

Professional credentials—experience, education, seniority, or past performance—are equivalent to abilities

If a team is dysfunctional, almost certainly a single individual is responsible Prevailing theory of interpersonal troubles in teams:

• Related to the Fundamental Attribution Error

• Cause is always within the team • Cause is always a defect in one Osama bin Laden or more persons • It is the task of management to investigate and determine who is the cause • Fixing that person or persons fixes the team

• Attributing behavior mostly Ferdinand de Lesseps to character and disposition • Situational factors aren’t considered enough

• Fallacy extends beyond abilities to credibility 9


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Naturalism: Fantasy and reality

Culturalism: Fantasy and reality

• Assessing ability based on credentials is tempting:

• Leaders “own” formal allocation of credit and blame for performance:

• Easy • Makes interviews go smoothly • Simplifies promotion decisions

• They have an inherent conflict of interest • They tend to credit leaders for high performance • They tend to blame team members for dysfunction

• The reality:

• The realities of team performance:

• Such assessments likely ignore past prevailing context • Valid assessments must consider past prevailing context • Such information is usually difficult to get

• • • •

Anyone can undermine a team’s performance No single person can create high performance External factors certainly do contribute Performance is most directly due to choices of team members

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Indicators of the Naturalistic Fallacy

Indicators of the Culturalistic Fallacy

• If someone led a few projects that failed, we conclude that he or she is incapable • If they succeeded, we conclude they’re capable • The most important attributes of new hires are past achievements • A tendency to evaluate the validity of someone’s claims based not on evidence but on past performance

• Our leaders (CEO, CTO, etc.) have talent for creating organizational cultures • They’ve done it before here and/or elsewhere • We have a great “corporate culture” because of them

• Credit for high performance of teams tends to flow towards leaders • Blame for dysfunction tends to flow towards team members • No policy ever revised due to a team’s troubles

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4.

The Culturalistic Fallacy

5.

The Fungibility Fallacy

Every person produces one hour of output in one hour. We can substitute people for one another.

Only organizational leaders create high performance teams, and they do it without the assistance or influence of the team’s people

• Our ability to construct useful financial models is limited

An early assembly line

• Spreadsheet modeling skills in organizations are usually poor • Our organizations are complicated and changing rapidly

Bill Belichick • Organizational leaders use their talent, insight and power to create culture • The culture becomes a real thing • It then creates the high performance teams

• We need simplifying assumptions in our models • One common simplifying assumption: people are fungible 15


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Fungibility: Fantasy and reality

Linearity: Fantasy and reality

• The fantasy: Running “lean and mean” saves money • The reality:

• The fantasy:

• Only a few people can perform certain tasks • Tools that distinguish the skills of large numbers of unique individuals are unreliable, hard to use • Running “lean and mean” makes the problem worse • Delays and lost market windows (due to overloading) cost real money • Running a little “fatter and kinder” might be more profitable

• Economies of scale • Combining efforts saves time and money

• The reality: • Projects are inherently nonlinear • Complexity grows combinatorially with the size • Operating costs per unit of output grow rapidly with project size • Costs decline unexpectedly slowly as we scale the project down in size • We have difficulty abandoning control processes as we move down in size • We lose in both directions

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Indicators of the Fungibility Fallacy

Indicators of the Linearity Fallacy

• Use of language such as:

• Merging projects to gain efficiency • Acquiring a smaller company and assuming its efficiency won’t be affected • Reducing scope to enable “focus” • Belief that success at a smaller scale predicts success at a much larger scale • If it worked for them it will work for us, even though the scales are very different

• Man-month, person-month, man-year, person-year • Headcount • “Can I swap you Jeff for Jennifer for a couple weeks?” • FTE (full-time-equivalent)

• Dependence on financial models that don’t recognize unique abilities of individuals • Accounting for effort by assuming that time is equivalent to output 20

6.

The Linearity Fallacy

The human effort required to execute a project scales in proportion to project attributes such as project size or total budget

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Pack ice in the Ross Sea, Jan. 2004. Photo credit: Edmund Stump, NASA

• The complexity of an effort affects its efficiency • Cost is driven, in part, by coordinating the parts of the effort • Linearity assumes that the cost of coordination grows like complexity


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The Normative Fallacy

When we ask some people for their opinions, and most of them agree, they are correct • We often engage in unscientific polling • We poll internally • We poll customers and prospects

George Gallup

• We tend to find uniform results persuasive, even when the polls aren’t scientific 21

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Normalizing: Fantasy and reality

Availability heuristic: Fantasy and reality

• The fantasy:

• The fantasy:

• “Ask the experts. They know the right answers.” • We’re in a hurry. This quick poll will be good enough. • We don’t need to hear from skeptics • Our users know best

• We can estimate probabilities by intuition • We need not use systematic data analysis methods

• The reality: • Humans are notoriously incapable of estimating probabilities • Estimating probabilities is unlikely to produce reliable results • We must use real data, or use huge error bars

• The reality: • Non-random polling might provide comfort • But it’s hardly scientific • It almost always leads to biased conclusions

To get truly useful polling data, you must poll people randomly 25

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Indicators of the Normative Fallacy

Indicators of the Availability Heuristic

• When polling a group for their opinions

• Estimates of risk probabilities are usually based on “judgment” • We use estimates of budgets/schedules that contain no error bars • Estimates of budgets/schedules are usually based on “judgment”

• Responding to the poll is voluntary • Not polling randomly

• Cherry-picking respondents • Polling only those of high rank • Not investigating the respondents’ bases for their opinions

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8.

The Availability Heuristic

We can estimate probabilities using whatever data we happen to have available and tempering it with our experience and wisdom

9.

Oceanic Whitetip Shark

• The Availability Heuristic is a method of estimating • Originally identified in the context of estimating probabilities • Which is more likely:


The Grandiosity Fallacy

Instead of solving the problem we have, we can solve a generalization of it. That way, we solve a host of similar problems, including the original one, almost “for free.” Credit: Michael Aston CC BY-NC 2.0

• Being bitten by a shark • Being hit by falling airplane parts

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Messerschmitt 262 Jet Fighter

• In World War II, Allies had air superiority • Based not on superior equipment, but on superior numbers • Germany tried to gain superiority with technology • Could not produce aircraft in sufficient numbers • Could not produce fuel to fly them 30


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Grandiosity: Fantasy and reality

Invulnerability: Fantasy and reality

• The fantasy:

• The fantasy:

• We can save money in the long run by solving the general problem • Customers want the general solution, but they don’t know they do

• The reality: • Rarely does the reality match the wish • Grandiosity is often more expensive and timeconsuming than originally estimated • Customers rarely want the general solution • If they did, they probably would have sought it in the first place • Working on the specific problem produces useful new knowledge

• We don’t have to worry about the fallacies • We’ve never had a problem • If we did, we’d know

• The reality • Nearly every organization is vulnerable • Performance of nearly all organizations: • Has been compromised in the past • Is being compromised now • Will be compromised in the future

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Indicators of the Grandiosity Fallacy

Indicators of the Invulnerability Fallacy

• In negotiations, seeking the “grand bargain” • In projects, meeting “next generation” requirements • Designing the product to be the first of a new “product family”

• Insufficient discussion of the possibility that we make choices influenced by fallacies

• Before the organization has committed to producing the family, or • Before we understand the needs of the sibling products, or • Before we know if the siblings will have customers • Before we know what customers of the siblings will want

• No mention of these or analogous fallacies in risk plans • We don’t review risk plans for presence of these fallacies • Managers not monitored for behavior consistent with fallacies

• Insufficient (or no) analysis of failures • Acknowledging failures is rare • Canceling projects is rare

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10. The Invulnerability Fallacy

Last words

I, and the people of my organization, are far less vulnerable to any of these fallacies than other people are. We’re safe.

• We’re all at risk of subscribing to these fallacies • The degree of “fallacy risk” depends on the organization and its history • Beware: “calling out” fallacies during usage incidents doesn’t work • Two recommendations:

• Missing in most organizations: • The idea that some of what we think we know is actually false • Specializing industry “best practices” to our own enterprise

• Tailor your risk plans to address the fallacy risks most relevant to your organization • Educate your colleagues in advance of any incidents

• Unquestioning adherence to “principles” 33


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Recent publications • “Leading in the Time of Data Breaches” • Cutter IT Journal, August, 2014 • Deals with decision-making in cyber security • Download a free copy at: http://goo.gl/H9QfrK

• “Creating High-Performance Virtual Teams” • Cutter IT Journal, May 2013 • Fourteen recommendations for enhancing performance of virtual teams • Download a free copy at: http://goo.gl/B4PCn 37

Resources • Politics, meetings, communication, and conflict • Articles at http://ChacoCanyon.com/pointlookout/politics.shtml • Tips ebook 303 Secrets of Workplace Politics: Acrobat: http://goo.gl/7hG5g iTunes iBook: http://goo.gl/eWK75 • Articles at http://ChacoCanyon.com/pointlookout/communication.shtml • Tips ebook 101 Tips for Communication in Emergencies at http://ChacoCanyon.com/products/techdivide.shtml • Tips ebook 101 Tips for Effective Meetings at http://ChacoCanyon.com/products/101tipsmeetings.shtml • Tips ebook 101 Tips for Managing Conflict at http://ChacoCanyon.com/products/101tipsconflict.shtml • LinkedIn group on Organizational Politics: http://goo.gl/4cKBWQ

• Links collection: http://goo.gl/f8Aoea • Follow Rick on Twitter: @RickBrenner http://www.Twitter.com/RickBrenner • Connect with Rick on LinkedIn: http://LinkedIn.com/in/RickBrenner

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Ten Fallacies PMI NUC 2015-05-12