What’s Wrong With Failure?
Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at [email protected]. Andy's new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.
In PMI’s new report on The Evolution of PMOs, the section on psychological safety notes this statistic: “Only 18% of organizations focus on fostering psychological safety and a tolerance of failure in the workplace.”
Eighteen percent. Less than one in five organizations.
As someone who has spent my career working in project environments, I find that a terrifying number. Anyone who has worked on projects for any length of time has experienced a failed project—I’ve lost count of how many I have led. It’s the nature of projects that no matter how good the team or the PM, sometimes things go wrong. It used to be worse than it is now because planning and estimating were far less mature and far more manual, but let’s not pretend that every project is going to succeed.
Yet more than four in five organizations don’t tolerate failure. I understand that there are degrees of tolerance, and that ultimately the survey is based on the perceptions and experiences of individuals, but let’s recognize that this has a significant impact. Many of us will have worked in an environment where status reporting was adjusted to try and avoid giving an overall red status.
We can likely all remember times when we’ve felt pressured to have our teams put in extra hours to recover from a problem before it had to be escalated. And we have…
Please log in or sign up below to read the rest of the article.
|
What's so great about a mom and pop store? Let me tell you something, if my mom and pop ran a store I wouldn't shop there. - George Costanza |
