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Date
By Cyndee Miller
We all prefer the familiar. I gravitate to pizza and a big glass of red wine. I buy a lot of jewelry (usually with insects and/or skulls). And I tend to hire people who ask a lot of good questions without stirring up a lot of drama.
That hardwired pull to what we know and like isn’t just human nature, it’s evolutionary biology. But it can also mean project practitioners are skimping on the critical thinking.
“What’s most familiar to you is you,” keynoter Margaret Heffernan told attendees of PMI® Global Congress 2015—EMEA in London, England. “To the degree that we surround ourselves with people predisposed to agree with us, we are editing out the opportunity for challenges. And that’s dangerous because the people who are just like us won’t notice the early warning signs that we turn a blind eye to.”
She challenged the nearly 800 project practitioners in the audience to avoid such “willful blindness.”
London was a fitting venue for the gathering: It’s an ancient yet hypermodern city where people from around the world rub shoulders and help invent the future. And that future, said Ms. Heffernan, will reward organizations that help teams value diversity and avoid thoughtless conformity.
“Organizations don’t have ideas,” she said, “only people do.”
To build the teams that give them a competitive edge, organizations must foster connectedness and trust—what Ms. Heffernan called “social capital.”
“Teams that are highly connected can be more powerful and effective than teams that are highly funded,” she said. Yet that requires an organizational commitment to stop team churn. “The longer teams work together, the more effective they become.”
So how can organizations build their social capital and avoid being eclipsed by more forward-looking competitors?
Create an environment “where nobody has to ask permission to have great ideas,” Ms. Heffernan said. It’s not just about getting smart people in the same room. Three traits characterize top-performing teams, she said: Team members are socially empathic. All members have equal importance and influence. And the teams aren’t male-dominated.
The goal must be to see the threats and challenges “that we most desperately need to see, early,” Ms. Heffernan said.
Posted
by
cyndee miller
on: May 12, 2015 05:52 PM |
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