Drilling Through Granite, Part 2

 

In evaluating the whole concept of knowledge transfer, it’s sometimes easy to become frustrated with the amount of energy devoted to analyzing the topic. I mean, seriously, isn’t “knowledge transfer” what happens when people engage in conversation? How hard can it be? Well, recall the classic scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, where Michael Palin’s King character is trying to tell two guards to “Stay here and make sure he (meaning the prince standing four feet away) doesn’t leave.”? The guards, who appear otherwise normal, can’t understand the simple command and, in the movie at least, hilarity ensues. It can be that tough.

So, in the analysis phase communications experts will usually invoke some truisms, such as it’s the responsibility of the communicator to make the message clear to the receivers, and not the responsibility of the receivers to take in the transmitter’s intended true meaning. Generally speaking, that’s true, but the exceptions to the rule(s) are the dangerous elements here.

For example, back when I was writing the Variance Threshold column for PMNetwork magazine, I had an incident where a fellow wrote to my e-mail address taking me to task for a piece I had written on critical path scheduling, where I discussed variables to consider when deciding how to handle schedule float. This person wrote in a rather condescending tone, challenging my analysis on schedule float based on his assertion that float did not exist. I swear I am not making this up. At first I assumed that nobody who described themselves as a “senior scheduler,” as this person did, could be that ignorant, and therefore took his meaning as being akin to some of Eliyahu Goldratt’s work in the novel The Critical Chain.  In this – again – novel, the project manager protagonist transfers personnel from non-critical path activities to critical ones, thereby shortening the project’s overall duration. Of course, since the idea was being presented in a fictional venue, the tactic succeeded fantastically, the protagonists lived happily ever after, no character ever steps up and says “Hey! Isn’t that tactic identical to the old ‘crashing—the – schedule’ trick?”, and the body of project management theory had been altered (and not necessarily for the better).

Graciously assuming my provocateur was referring to this bit of shoddy management science, I responded with the reasons I thought “critical chain” was not valid. The e-mail writer wrote again, stating flatly that that wasn’t what he was talking about. Rather, he clarified that schedule float did not exist because (I’m paraphrasing), when a manager told a project team member to do something, well, then, by golly, that thing had to be done then. Clearly, this fellow was resistant to knowledge transfer, at least when it came to CPM or came from me. I was tempted to respond with something along the lines of “Stay here, and make sure he doesn’t leave,” but thought the better of it. I’ve had similar e-mail interactions with those who took exception to my criticizing risk management techniques, some of which were positively hysterical.

I think the common thread here is that, once a person creates an emotional attachment to something otherwise as innocuous as a project management theory, hypothesis, idea, technique or tactic, that facts and insight – knowledge – suddenly have a much harder time of being transferred into that person’s thinking. This may be due to (ironically enough) a derivative of the sunk-costs argument, where, say, a professional risk analyst assigned to a non-pharmaceutical project looks back on those semesters of statistics classes suffered through (strikethrough) taken and passed, and can’t understand why the Earned Value and Critical Path information streams are so much more valuable than his Monte Carlo simulations. Frustration sets in, and the next thing you know mildly unhinged missives start showing up in some columnist’s in-box.

In any event, evaluations of knowledge transfer are usually predicated on the notion that there exists persons willing and able to receive the knowledge, once proffered. I’m not sure that’s always the case.