Learning How To Learn

John Sullivan is a working project manager who writes and speaks on project and career issues.

  Lessons Learned  

As a practitioner of project management, I am constantly trying to learn how to be more effective. The odds are against me. Some studies claim that more that half of all projects are late and that almost every project goes over budget. This disturbs me since we advocate a "lessons learned" exercise for every project--a post-project review that attempts to determine what went wrong, why it went wrong and what could have been done differently that would have prevented the wrong from occurring.

My professional angst led me to a psychologist: Dr. Gary Klein, author of Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions (MIT Press, 1999). Klein has studied decision making in a variety of professions, from fire fighting to nursing. He tries to understand "how people handle all of the typical confusions and pressures of their environment, such as missing information, time constraints, vague goals and changing conditions," he says.

If that description sounds like your project, read on.

According to Klein, while decision making seems to favor the experienced person (an obvious conclusion), the experience must often be put into context to be made meaningful (a not-so-obvious conclusion). In the book, he cites a group of Midwestern U.S. fire fighters trying to battle an oil tank fire. They had experience fighting fires--mostly barn and garage fires--but the different context of the fire (an …

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