Book Review: Project Think

 

A Russian spy, Ivan Petroff, infiltrated the white House disguised as a rat exterminator and stole a top-secret document. Three people witnessed Ivan Petroff inside the White House. Whose description of the spy is most probable?

a) White House bartended Mick Mousy described the exterminator as a big guy in a black suite.

b) White House taxi driver Mohamed Toscanini described the exterminator as a big guy in a black suit and sunglasses.

c) White House secret service agent Bert Bigneck described the exterminator as a big guy in a black suit and sunglasses, who spoke with a Russian accent.

This is how Project Think: Why Good Managers Make Poor Project Choices begins. A series of questions designed to test your decision making and uncover biases. I’ll tell you what the right answer is at the end.

Project Think, by Lev Virine and Michael Trumper, is a thought-provoking book. They include lots of examples of failed projects and poor judgement on projects and unpick why that might have happened. They talk about three types of mental error that lead to mistakes on projects:

• Overconfidence
• Confirmation bias
• Optimism bias.

All of these result in a lack of analysis of the facts – basically jumping to conclusions and failure to see the real situation on a project.

Sometimes, the authors say, intuition is enough. But often, you need to take that out of the equation and go with analysis.

It’s a well-researched book that I found fascinating, but it’s a shame that there a number of typographical errors in it: a missing full stop here, a misspelling of an author’s name there. The editor could have done a better job at making sure those little points were sorted out, although I’m going through the same stages for my new book at the moment and I know that it’s not easy.

The book aims to take a different view of project risk by talking about the risks that we, as project managers, sponsors and team members, introduce into a project through poor judgment and lack of analysis. Are those on your risk register? Thought not.

The Alternatives

So what do they recommend instead? The authors talk about a number of ways that you can try to reduce your personal biases and make better decisions. While ultimately their aim is to make you more aware that those biases are there, so you can more critically analyse your own thought processes when it comes to making decisions, they also offer a number of suggestions.

They talk about ‘choice engineering’ which means not mandating one process for everything. For example, on a small project you might choose to follow a particular path or use a particular template. By allowing people to apply their judgement (or use a set of criteria to identify the suitability of their project) you can help them use the right tools for the job.

They also talk about ‘adaptive management’. This is basically using iterative processes and continuous process improvement combined with a number of other ways of working such  as:

• Multi-model analysis: not using the same tools all the time to run your analysis when you might get a different result or a different understanding if you used another model.
• Hypothesis testing: trying out a hypothesis and testing it before committing to a course of action.
• Performance measurement: this gives you data to use for decision making and assuming you do it well should give an accurate picture of the truth today.
• Making reversible decisions: I’m not personally sure how practical this is, but I can see it working in some situations where you have the flexibility to move to a different course of action if required.

Back To The Spy…

As for the Russian spy, the most probably description is (a). The authors point out that the more general the description, the more likely it is to be accurate. They also explain that the representativeness heuristic can lead to a number of mistakes in decision making, not least because it clouds your judgement. What this means is that people “make judgements about probabilities and risks based on the category that this object, person, or process represents.” In other words, you are programmed to believe the secret service agent, despite the fact that the chances of the suit, sunglasses and accent coming together at the same time is less probable than the other two descriptions.

The book is a challenge for open-mindedness and well worth a read. It will make you question how you come to conclusions on your project and the biases inherent in your decision making. While alone that won’t promise you better project results, it should go some way to making sure that your projects have a better chance of success because you are taking away the risk of poorly-formed decisions.