I Know! Let’s Set A Trap For Them!

 

I think one of the cleverest ruses used by law enforcement to round up people who have outstanding arrest warrants without having to spend the resources to track them down involves sending those people notices that they have won some sort of contest or prize (my personal favorite claimed they had won Super Bowl tickets), and to show up at a certain place and time to claim their reward. Once these people arrived and presented proof of who they were, they would simply be taken into custody to face the charges against them. Yeah, I know it ruined their days, but I simply had to laugh, for two reasons:
•    They were criminals getting their comeuppance as a result of their stupidity,
•    …and it is actually pretty funny.
What does this have to do with project management? Well, the past few weeks I’ve been on a tear about Effectives versus Processors, about how the Effectives, while undoubtedly the superior PMs, were nevertheless thwarted in the organization by their Processor counterparts, who always seemed to be the ones making the rules that the Effectives had to follow. Based on the example of the fake-winnings ruse, I had another idea on how to deal with the Processors.
First, we need to concentrate them in one place. No, not to take them away to jail, but to be able to clearly identify them for future interactions. So, what attracts Processors? Well, as we have been discussing, they love to write procedures that, once signed by upper management, they expect everyone else has to obey. These procedures are invariably based entirely on the Processor’s opinions or experiences, and no attempt to weed out instances of misunderstanding or confirmation bias is ever made. Indeed, no novel scholarship nor research ever enters in – these “rules” are subjective, arbitrary and capricious. For proof, I will point to the efforts of some risk managers to form Special Interest Groups within established professional societies, obtain permission to write that society’s rules on risk management, and then go about trying to re-define words away from their centuries-old, widely-known meanings. 
The funniest example I know of has to do with a certain risk SIG that wanted the word “risk” itself re-defined. According to Merriam-Websters’ On-Line Dictionary, it means:
(1)    the possibility that something bad or unpleasant (such as an injury or a loss) will happen
(2)    someone or something that may cause something bad or unpleasant to happen. 1
This particular risk SIG managed to get a professional society to change its definition in its glossary of terms to include any event, positive or negative, that impacts the performance of a project. Nevermind that the word “risk” never previously pertained to potential positive events (known everywhere else as “opportunity”)  – in their attempt to advance their kooky ideas, they simply had to hijack the language, lest intelligent managers realize that all they were talking about was institutional worrying, tripped out in statistical jargon.
Probably the next funniest attempt at a Processor trying to take over the PM world based on a dopey procedural notion happened when I was a contributing author to a practice standard being drafted by a PM professional society. One fellow actually addressed the document prep team, and strongly asserted that the only authors whose input should be included in the final document were those who had traveled internationally. I swear I am not making this up. If you are thinking that the link between having one’s passport stamped repeatedly and advanced expertise in certain aspects of project management is less than intuitive, go to the head of the class. 
So, what’s the solution? I think ProjectManagement.com should issue a call for contributors for the creation of a document that will be the ultimate guide to “doing” project management, one that is so authoritative that, once published, everyone will be forced to comply with its particulars, or be labelled as anti-PM forever. The call should include specifications such as the contributors need not have any peer-reviewed writings or journal entries, and that they will be at liberty to change the meaning of common words to suit their assertions. In fact, the only criterion for authors is that they view themselves as so advanced in project management expertise, that their opinions should be accepted without question. This will work on Processors like catnip.
Then, ProjectManagement.com could simply sell the list of volunteers to organizations headed by Effectives, who would then know whom to keep off of their project teams; alternately, they could accept money from the Processors (who couldn’t resist the bait) to have their names removed from the list, but that might be seen as blackmail. 
A similar kind of blackmail that Effectives are subject to whenever a Processor releases another insipid procedure…

 
  1 Merriam-Webster online dictionary, http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/risk, retrieved 19:44 MDT on September 12, 2015.