“You can hit this date, right?”

It’s Maria, one of your stakeholders from the other side of the business. She’s asking for a commitment to deliver a project by a specific date. You know the date is ambitious but the way she’s asking makes it clear that she’s only going to accept a Yes.

You pause.

“Sure!” is the word that slips out of your mouth. But if she could read your mind, she wouldn’t be walking away so confidently, leaving you once again with that sick feeling of “How in the world are we going to do this?”

After a day of ruminating about the project, you realize that you need something from her in order to deliver on the promised date. Your eyes brighten! She probably won’t be able to deliver on her part so that will give you some wiggle room! Brilliant!

You call her. “Hi Maria. You know that project we talked about yesterday? Well, in order to hit that date, this is what I need from you.” You elaborate on the needs.

It’s time to go for the ask. “I’ll need all this by the end of next week. Can you get that to me on time?” You pause, praying for a No.

Maria pauses. “Um. Well, let’s see. Yes, I can. Sure!”

Sigh.

Promises, Promises

Can you relate to the discussion with Maria? Perhaps you spend a lot of time in Maria’s role, receiving promises from people who you know won’t deliver. Or maybe you work with people like Maria, who press you with deadlines but don’t supply you with the information you need to deliver.

It’s important to note that you’re not alone. This drama plays out in organizations around the world, across industries. In a conversation with a high-level executive at a biotech firm, the discussion turned to how promises get made to investors and senior executives. He told me, “We make these date commitments but everyone knows we won’t hit them.”

I replied, “Kind of like mass hallucination, eh?” He smiled, but not with this eyes.

Project Culture

It is critical that you and your organization develop a culture that delivers. Relying on crossed fingers, hope, good intentions, and heroics doesn’t scale. The fundamentals of delivery need to be ingrained in the culture.

It’s rather fashionable these days to talk about organizational culture. Let me be clear: your organization has a culture of project management. It’s just a matter of whether or not that culture is helping or hindering your ability to deliver.

Yoda on Corporate Culture

Dr. Edgar Schein is the Society of Sloan Fellows Professor of Management Emeritus and a Professor Emeritus at the MIT Sloan School of Management. He’s widely credited with coining the term organizational culture. When I set up the interview to talk with Dr. Schein, I didn’t realize what a superstar the guy really was.

It didn’t take long in the interview for me to feel like I was talking with Yoda! He responded with ease to my questions about culture.

What is culture, according to Dr. Schein? In short, it’s what has worked. It’s the sum total of what a group has learned that works in solving problems. Whether you like it or not, the project culture in your organization exists because it has sufficiently worked in the past.

Dr. Schein suggests that culture can be broken down into three levels: artifacts, espoused values, and tacit assumptions.

What You Can See

If you walk through an organization, you can see the architecture of the building, the layout of the workspaces, the type of technology they provide for their employees, and the signs on the walls. These are artifacts—things that can be seen. For projects, you might see methodology binders, organization charts, process diagrams, and computer systems to manage project data. You could follow a project manager around and see their behavior—the actions they take. All of these help define the culture.

What We Say

As you continue walking through an organization, you might want to know why certain things are done. You see that a standard operating procedure is documented (the artifact), but you’re wondering why it’s done that way. These would be examples of espoused values—the stated beliefs that give a sense of what is truly valued in the organization?

For example, let’s say you find a form that seems like an unnecessary step in a process. You might ask, “Why do your project managers have to fill out this form?” Perhaps a response would be, “Because we’ve found that the extra step helps make sure we don’t start projects without a business rationale. A couple years back we found that we were wasting too much money on different executives’ pet projects.”

What We Assume

Yet beyond what we see and what is said, there are underlying assumptions that drive what and how things get done in an organization. They are not even stated—just assumed—as if they are obviously a fact or a matter of truth.

All these factors are like an iceberg. Above the water we can see the artifacts and discuss beliefs and values. But below the water we have the underlying assumptions. As with icebergs, these remain unseen and yet can be deadly if not taken into account.

Let’s say your executive team regularly sends e-mails late into the evening. It might be assumed by others that such activity is expected from everyone. There’s not a policy in writing (artifact) that directs people to do so. If you asked someone in HR whether employees are required to be on e-mail until midnight, they could not point to such direction in an Employee Handbook. Yet there’s this underlying assumption of the expectation, which leads to overflowing inboxes and red, baggy eyes amongst a workforce assuming that sleep is not a priority.

In a previous post I wrote about the written and unwritten rules. When considering culture, think of Dr. Schein’s artifacts and espoused values as the written rules—those things above the water. The underlying assumptions are the unwritten rules, those drivers that we cannot see under the water that drive everything above it.

In our next post, we’ll talk about how to make some progress in changing your project culture. But for now, here’s my challenge for you: take some time to consider your current project culture. What is above the water, so to speak, when it comes to projects? What are the written rules? The artifacts? The stated reasons for why things are done?

When we talk about this in our workshops and keynotes, people often reply with things like tools (e.g. Microsoft Project, Asana, XMind, etc.), their Project Management Office (PMO), templates, processes, executive level support, stated expectations, etc. How would you resond?

In addition, what are those factors under the water, so to speak: the underlying assumptions? What are the unwritten rules at your organization regarding how projects should be managed? See how many you can identify. I invite you to share your observations and questions in the comments below.

You can’t sustain a culture of mass hallucination. Hope is a wonderful thing for humanity but’s a lousy strategy for delivering projects. Let’s start with diagnosing your current culture. Next time we’ll talk about how to change that conversation with Maria.

If this post was helpful, I invite you to share it with your connections and LinkedIn groups.

Listen to the interview with Dr. Edgar Schein athttp://www.PeopleAndProjectsPodcast.com/25.