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7/1/2010
On a recent trip to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival I spotted a whole mess of geese flying overhead, so I quickly snapped some shots with my iPhone. Here’s one of the pictures I took. Geese flying in their famous “V” formation have always fascinated me. When I see geese flying together like this I wonder if they had to have a lengthy meeting, or perhaps a project kick off, to arrange the formation, agree who is flying in which position, the direction and exact route, and when various birds will take the lead during which part of the journey. Maybe they have a shared data storage drive where each goose can log in and review the diagrams of the flight, and perhaps there are oodles of Power Point presentations explaning the vision, mission and purpose, yadda, yadda, yadda.
Nah, probably not. In spite of the fact that I’m pretty sure that geese DON’T have such project management meetings and agreements, geese flocks in flight look pretty well organized to me. And, based on personal observation, there doesn’t seem to be a lot of squabbling over direction or roles and responsibilities. Every goose seems pretty intent on just getting where ever they are going – together – following the leader, with the whole team arranged for maximum distance with minimum effort. That’s the kind of focused teamwork I aim to have on the projects I work on. As much as I am tempted to take charge and boss people around, I find that this kind of effortless collaboration is only possible when we’re open to different ways of working together. These “different ways” are what I’ve been calling “systems thinking” in this series of blogs.
When we’re kids we learn about cause and effect. Fall down and scrape our knee, it hurts, and it hurts right away. But in the real world of projects, and business in general, cause and effect are not connected in quite to tidy a way. I’m not saying we should abandon linear models of reality, just augment them with additional ways of understanding reality. Some things do move faster when pushed harder (certain ‘unresponsive’ – let’s not call them irresponsible right off the bat – people, for example), but not every system responds in a way that makes it easy to see the relationship between our inputs and the outputs. We need more sophisticated ways of understanding the world in order to make better decisions in leading and managing projects.
In fact, maybe leading and managing aren’t even the right words. Maybe we’re facilitating a group of individuals in collaborating more effectively. Maybe the notion of leadership is inappropriate when you working with a group of people who all share a commitment to a future possibility and are determined to find ways to make that possibility into a reality. Someone has to make the decisions, of course, and not everything can be left up to consensus. But decision-making doesn’t have to be done by one-and-only-one leader. Different people may be better equipped to make better decisions in different areas. Maybe leadership is a temporary responsibility that rotates among team members, like the shared leadership of a flock of geese.
Oh, and when it comes to decision-making, don’t be so quick to think we’re rational. Some of the brain research I’ve come across suggests that around 80% of our decisions are made by the non-conscous parts of our brain. To me this means that our deep-seated mental models are driving decisions even when we are not consciously aware that they are doing so. If this is true then it’s all the more important that we embed a variety of different mental models into our thinking. Chaos, complexity, non-linearity, emergent behavior, and systems thinking in general, offer a rich collection of ways of understanding reality that simple cause-and-effect and complicated command-and-control don’t fit very well, if at all. For this reason alone it makes sense to equip ourselves with a well-stocked toolbox of mental models that can better prepare us for the complex circumstances in which our projects operate.
If you want to read more of my musings about systems thinking, I wrote a couple of longer articles for ProjectConnections.com recently on these topics:
- Catalytic Mechanism, or how itty-bitty changes can make big honkin’ differences.
- Systems Thinking, including chaos, complexity and emergent behavior.
Just because it LOOKS complicated doesn’t mean it is.
This article first appeared on "The Art of Project Management," hosted by the University of California Santa Cruz Extension site.
Kimberly Wiefling is the author of one of the top project management books in the US, "Scrappy Project Management - The 12 Predictable and Avoidable Pitfalls Every Project Faces", and the founder of Wiefling Consulting, LLC, a scrappy global consulting enterprise committed to enabling her clients to achieve highly unlikely or darn near impossible results, predictably and repeatedly. You can reach her via email at kimberly@wiefling.com.
6/28/2010Studying chaos, complexity, and non-linear systems has taught me that control is an illusion – and sometimes completely unnecessary. Complicated outcomes need not be the result of complicated processes, or tight-fisted control, as Dr. Stephen Wolfram illustrated in his combination door-stop/book “ A New Kind of Science” some years ago ( available to read for free online). I marvel at the enormous documents and gantt charts that are part of some projects, wondering if anyone reads those besides the person who created them. It has always seemed to me that something extremely complicated to read might also be extremely complicated to do, so I’ve worked hard to make my documents lightweight, readable and easy to follow. I thought I was doing a pretty good job organizing large groups of people around shared objectives, and was pretty impressed with my results . . . until I studied insects.
Insects manage to work together to accomplish the most amazing tasks! Ants, for example, manage to cooperate without any requirements documents or team agreements. Their approach seems to be “Work hard. Leave a trail. Follow a trail.” Examples of sensible division of labor, and communication via scent trails to enable effective individual and group foraging, have earned my admiration. Their collaborative behavior has enabled ants to colonize most of the earth. (Ants probably think that they are the dominant species on the planet, just like we do.) I often wish that a project team could work together as seemingly effortlessly as thousands of ants.
While I’m a big admirer of ants, in my view termites are the be-all-end-all of insect collaborative behavior. Without a single project document, or even a scrum master, they manage to build outrageous structures like this Disney-like castle termite mound. How do they do it? Well, I’m not a termite (in spite of what some of my colleagues may have said about me), but my understanding is that individual termites are all following some very simple operating instructions, but the cumulative effect of their simple actions is a very complex structure. This is an example of emergent behavior – complex patterns emerging from simple individual behaviors.
While studying insects has been fascinating, I eventually was curious to see if humans could achieve similar results, so I did an experiment that I call “Wander-A-B”, but some people call “Predator-Protector”. You can do this experiment, too, and directly observe an example of some of the amazing behavior that can occur when large groups of people follow simple instructions.
Wander A-B Exercise: Assemble at least 15 people, more if you can (20–30 would be nice) in a large room or open space where they can all wander around with plenty of room in between them. There are 3 phases to this exercise. Describe all 3 phases before beginning, and then just signal when each new phase begins, perhaps by ringing a chime or making a chimpanzee sound (feel free to go wild here).
Phase 1 – Everyone wanders around aimlessly (that should be easy for most groups of people) and then secretly identifies someone in the crowd to be their “A” person and someone else to be their “B” person.
Phase 2 – Everyone continues wandering, but now moving so that their secret “A” person is always between themselves and their secret “B” person.
Phase 3 – Everyone continues wandering (and by this time perhaps wondering what they heck they are doing!), but now moving so that they are positioned between their secret “A” and “B” people.
Notice what happens during Phase 2 and Phase 3 (which should come to a rather abrupt end).
I’ll tell you what happens if I get some comments asking about it, but it’s more fun just to do it. Without anything more than these simple instructions, two pretty surprising group behaviors manifest. (Phase 2 is a nice demonstration of a self-organizing system where each “agent’s” individual behavior leads to a mess. Phase 3 demonstrates how different agent behavior leads to a well-organized overall result.)
Control vs. Emergence: While I am tempted to try to control situations, my study of ants and termites makes me think “Hey, if insects can do it, maybe humans can, too!” Maybe there are other ways to get large groups of people to cooperate and collaborate without detailed direction or a large amount of control. What if we could get each of our project “agents” to operate according to individual behavioral principles that would lead to overall project success without excessive control and oversight? What would make that possible? What do you think?
6/25/2010The recent economic woes, and accompanying 10% official unemployment rate, have a lot of my friends looking for work. Down-sized, right-sized, cap-sized, some are entering their job search emotionally ill-equipped for the journey ahead. The job search process is discouraging, I think primarily because the task of getting a new job is 0% complete until it’s 100% complete – that is, until the offer is in hand. This is a terrific example of a non-linear process, where the output is not proportional to the input. In plain English, linear systems have a 1-to-1 relationship between inputs and outputs. Doubling the input doubles the output. For example, if you drive twice as fast on an open stretch of road – say 160 km/hour (around 100 mph) instead of 80 km/hour (around 50 mph) – you will travel twice as far per hour. And halfway through the hour you’ll be halfway through the total distance. That’s tidy, linear, and easy to understand. And most of life isn’t like that. We intuitively know that if we work twice as many hours a day on our project we won’t necessarily make twice as much progress, and it could even make things worse due to increased mistakes requiring rework.
Job searches, projects, and life in general, are non-linear. Non-linear systems have more complicated relationships between their “goes-into” inputs and “comes-out-of” outputs. Imagine a person who takes 10 months to find a new job, like one of my extremely well-educated, experienced and talented friends. About 9.5 months into the process how do you think he feels? Like he’s 95% done? Nope! Not at all. In fact, he was more discouraged than ever, feeling farther from the goal than at any other time during the job search process. And then 2 weeks later he got a terrific job. Poof! Notice that in such a non-linear process there can be little indication of progress toward the goal until the goal is achieved.
There are plenty of examples of tough to track non-linear processes in projects. The number of bugs fixed isn’t necessarily an indication of how close the product is to being ready to ship if one show-stopper bug stands between the team and a shippable product. When it comes to safety, a product is either going to meet safety requirements or it’s not. It would be strange to say “Our product is 90% non-lethal.” It’s either possible for the product to kill you, or it’s not. The number of features included in a product might not directly relate to the suitability for the market, or subsequent customer satisfaction.
Psychologists have studied the relationship between perceived progress and the level of effort people put out. It’s no surprise that they’ve found that people will work more productively if they can see the progress they are making towards their goal. (In fact one study I came across indicated that people will put out up to 60% more effort if they perceive their steady progress towards the goal.) But in non-linear situations this kind of visibility of progress is not so easy to come by (and in most cases in project scheduling % complete is just so much nonsense made up by someone filling in a spreadsheet).
So how are we supposed to maintain our team’s motivation and productivity when it’s extremely difficult to determine how much progress we are making towards our goal? We simply must find ways to help our teams perceive progress. I’ve found that the next best thing to measuring progress in such a situation is to measure activity. In these circumstances activity = progress. In a job search that means tracking the number of jobs applied for, resumes sent out, phone calls made, networking breakfasts, lunches and dinners, professional association meetings attended, and even rejections received. In a product development project that could mean tracking the number of defects fixed, as many teams do, maybe adding a weighting factor for level of severity of bugs fixed to make. Or maybe tracking the number of safety tests completed, markets sampled or customers surveyed.
Could your project benefit from an additional 60% productive effort from your team? Find ways to help them sense their progress towards the goals, and keep them informed of this progress through regular updates. Don’t settle for practically useless progress indicators like % complete. Find some meaningful activity to measure, track it visibly, and keep your team informed of the rate of completion of these activities in pursuit of the ultimate goal. And if you are one of the people experiencing the excitement of career transition, keeping a visible record of your activities on the wall of your bathroom can help you perceive your progress towards the uncertain date of your next employment. There are lots more jobs available these past few months. Keep Hope Alive! Survive to Thrive! Good luck!
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