The fifth installment of my Unlearning Project Management series has been posted online. Here's the link.
"In a recent conversation, Howell
remarked, “Current project controls increase risk in projects
... external risk is rarely the killer. Things most often go wrong
because of the wreckage caused by the feedback and control used in
current PM: control for cost, squeeze ‘em down, and the
people will find a way to do just what you ask — reduce the
immediate cost of their work. This reduces the predictability of
workflow in the system, further reducing performance. Hazing
managers in response to further cost increases puts projects into
the death spiral.”
The problem is that we believe we have a problem. Slip over here for more ...
"Even deeper than
emergence and its challenge to reductionism in this new
scientific worldview is what I call breaking the Galilean
spell. Galileo rolled balls down incline planes and showed that the
distance traveled varied as the square of the time elapsed. From
this he obtained a universal law of motion. Newton followed with
his Principia, setting the stage for all of modern science. With
these triumphs, the Western world came to the view that all that
happens in the universe is governed by natural law. Indeed, this is
the heart of reductionism. Another Nobel laureate physicist, Murray
Gell-Mann, has defined a natural law as a compressed
description, available beforehand, of the regularities of a
phenomenon. The Galilean spell that has driven so much science is
the faith that all aspects of the natural world can be described by
such laws. Perhaps my most radical scientific claim is that
we can and must break the Galilean spell. Evolution of the
biosphere, human economic life, and human history are partially
indescribable by natural law. This claim flies in the face of
our settled convictions since Galileo, Newton, and the
Enlightenment."
from: BREAKING THE GALILEAN SPELL By Stuart A.
Kauffman
Whatever else you're reading, you just gotta read this. It's gorgeous!!
The fourth installment of my Unlearning Project
Management--The Control Dilemma--series has been posted. Here's the link.
Question of the day: What does the following video have to do with unlearning?
Read that posting before you read this one, to get the contiguous story!
... ...
Finally, we invite people to bring themselves to the workshop. Not the role you play or the title you display, but your shoes-off self. To arrive skeptical if you are skeptical. Optimistic if you are optimistic. Curious if you are curious.
We invite you to bring yourself to the workshop because I noticed, after attending many workshops, that I usually didn’t show up. I sent who I was supposed to be in my stead, and this surrogate postured and posed, and stayed in his head where no situated learning could really penetrate. If managing projects is a continuing act of self discovery, then bringing your self to the effort seems necessary, essential.
I wish I could claim credit for the snappy title, but that is the work of P@W's fine editor, Aaron Smith.
The picture accompanying this posting comes from the final exercise of our Mastering Projects Workshop, where after two and a half days deeply considering how projects work, participants are assigned a planning exercise where traditional Management By Planning approaches fail. Few groups fail to create meaning with this experience, and none who succeed do so in ways they imagined beforehand. This installment considers alternatives to Management By Planning.
The first two installments generated a lot of comments. This one hasn't. Don't know why, but I'll appreciate any bark-back you might feel moved to post there.
Here's a taste of the content:
"Management By Planning, carried to its naturally recursive root, enlists every member of a project’s community as a planning project manager, which is far from Fayol and Taylor’s original Management By Planning intent. Each interprets the plan they receive, producing a locally situated version. Whether the plan received is wise depends, again, upon the mindfulness of each situated planner. Whether the project manager is wise might depend more upon their ability to listen than their authority to dispatch pre-planned work assignments.
"In the Spanish viceroy system, a bureaucracy that lasted more than 500 years, each viceroy reported directly to the king. Communications being slow in those days, a dispatch from the king, responding to a viceroy’s report, could take more than a year to reach an individual viceroy. So, the viceroys adopted a simple rule for interpreting directions from the king — The King Is Wise. This rule encouraged each local viceroy to interpret the king’s direction in some way that would preserve the apparent wisdom of the king, even if this meant utterly changing his specific instructions."
What do
you see in this picture? And what does this picture have to do with
unlearning project management? See the second installment of my
Unlearning Project Management.
To claim uniqueness, however, does not explain much. This description might elicit many different negative comparisons, such as, “it is almost, but not entirely unlike this other workshop.”
How is this workshop unique? Most project workshops focus attention upon transferring explicit how-to skills: how to plan, how to track progress, how to control execution, and how to build a team. They focus upon the transfer and acquisition of explicit knowledge without ever considering how it is that one goes about acquiring and actually using that knowledge. Slip over here for more ...
I'm investigating some ways to spread the contents of this blog more widely using Technorati. I might as well start here:
I have been, over the past month, developing a series of articles for Projects@Work entitled Unlearning Project Management. The first in this series was published last week to varied critical reception; mostly, it seems, quite critical. My editor there didn't report any death threats, but he did say that several people recommended that he black ball me from further contribution. He said he'd stick with me through this series, hoping that I might "win over a few of my critics" by the time I've finished the series.
What IS my problem with project management as I see it increasingly practiced? Here's some background from an email exchange with one of the critics of the first installment: Slip over here for more ...
