"You Are No God, Kirok!"

 

In the classic Star Trek episode “The Paradise Syndrome,” Captain Kirk finds himself on a planet inhabited by people who practice the customs of North American native tribes but which, unfortunately, is about to be struck by a huge asteroid. An obelisk atop a structure (that clearly could not have been constructed by the natives) nearby is more than just an anomaly – it’s a device that an advanced civilization (“Preservers”) had put there untold years prior to deflect just such asteroids. However, the tribe’s medicine man, Salish, has no idea how to get inside the structure and invoke its protective capabilities. A stranded Kirk asks Miramanee, his love interest and future wife (a lot of people forget that, for much of the third season, James T. Kirk was actually a widower) how did it come about that Salish never received instruction on how to access the “temple,” and she replies that Salish’s father did not want to share the information too early, and died unexpectedly, leaving them in their current precarious situation.

Which brings us to ProjectManagement.com’s March theme, knowledge transfer and management. It’s axiomatic that information is the life-blood of any organization, particularly corporations and companies, and especially within project teams. It’s simply human nature to preserve that which makes a project team member valuable to the project team, and, in most instances, that’s some unique knowledge or capability. When everybody knows how to, say, operate Critical Path Methodology software effectively, then the price of CPM specialists drops precipitously. This is true of virtually any job that entails specialized knowledge, or advanced capability (which usually comes about because of specialized knowledge).

So, once again we have an instance of the best theoretical approach to a project management problem running smack-dab into legacy elements of human nature. The more heavy-handed amongst us will tend to demand policies that appear to combat such natural tendencies, while the more passive consultants will engage in (yet another) round of eat-your-peas-style hectoring, about how people ought to mentor, or engage stakeholders, or document their insights, blah blah blah.

My take, predictably enough, is a bit different. It’s based on the now-clichéd observations of how project teams become high-performers, specifically the Forming-Storming-Norming-Performing steps attributed to Bruce Tuckman in 1965. Newly-formed project teams that move into the Storming phase of this pattern can be expected to be comprised of individuals who are disinclined to do any knowledge sharing or transfer. Why? Because they don’t know where they fall within the team’s hierarchy. Offering up any insights that may be unique to them would make those insights suddenly un-unique, and the team member possessing them less valuable in a comparative sense. This reluctance is compounded if members of the team believe that others are competing with them for status within the group – the competitive sense within the group essentially destroys opportunities for cooperation, since the team’s members are attempting to establish their relative values to team leadership.

So, how does the project manager help reduce or eliminate inter-team rivalries, so as to shorten the Storming phase as much as possible? A few tactics are clearly indicated:

·         Prohibit ex parte discussions about team members. This is a common, but destructive tactic used by those attempting to curry favor with management at the expense of the other team members.

·         Make clear the precise ranking of each member of the project team, and how that ranking can be advanced. The answer to the second part of the previous sentence is always by helping the project team attain its objectives, and never about the individual moving up with respect to peers.

·         Finally, try to transfer the competitive instinct away from issues interior to the team, and on to the way things are unfolding exterior to the group, i.e. the team’s competitors.

I’ll discuss more advanced and nuanced methods in other March blogs. For now, though, if you find yourself on a planet inhabited by North American natives, about to be smashed by an asteroid, make sure Salish knows that slashing your hand open with a knife doesn’t help deflect the planet-crushing asteroid one little bit, and he needs to knock off the whole extending-the-Storming cycle gig.