Training Rats To Do PM

 

I like spending space in this blog ripping into openly fraudulent management science precepts that have somehow crept into the generally-accepted mainstream. I got to thinking the other day, how do these ideas get introduced in the first place, in such a way as to make them appear valid or attractive when they are plainly suspect? And I was instantly reminded of the book Walden Two.

For those of you who are (blessedly) not up-to-speed on the theories of B. F. Skinner, Walden Two was a utopian novel about an isolated community that was structured around the theories of behaviorism he would later expound upon in the infamous Beyond Freedom and Dignity. By basically shedding the norms of societal behavior that did not fit into the mold of stimulus-response-reward/punishment, this isolated community – surprise, surprise – became highly profitable and successful, populated by happy, well-adjusted people. The narrator, a reporter, who has come out to do a news story on the community, is so impressed that he abandons his reporter life, and joins the community.

Imagine that.

So, essentially this Harvard psychology professor advances his pet theory initially in a utopian novel (Walden Two preceded Beyond Freedom and Dignity by more than twenty years). Something similar happened with Critical Chain, where the technique long-known as “crashing the schedule” (i.e., transferring resources from non-critical path activities to critical ones in order to shorten the project’s overall duration) got a new name and, in a fictionalized setting, succeeds at several levels, among them in the project management realm.

Imagine that.

This kind of approach irritates me no end. I think it’s highly disingenuous, and ought to be considered ipso facto evidence of charlatanism. If you happen to belong to a well-led organization, a standard operating procedure is that, should your manager receive a communication that criticizes the work or character of a member of the project team, but such a communication is unsigned, it goes straight into the trash can, no exceptions. Indeed, organizations that do not have such a practice, formally nor informally, should be automatically assumed to be poorly-led. I think something similar needs to happen in the PM arena: if your profound, wide-ranging idea is introduced, not through a peer-reviewed publication such as the Project Management Journal, but rather through a fictionalized setting, such as a novel, well, your idea is probably too silly to be considered in a valid academic setting, no exceptions.

But that’s the purist in me talking. In the real world, many goofy ideas (my regular readers know I’m thinking about risk managers, communications experts, and GAAP practitioners, among others, who attempt to make inroads into the PM realm) arrive with so much glitter on them, it takes a hard-bitten blogger to call them out as suspect, much less mock-worthy.

But perhaps I’m mistaken. It’s happened before. So, I say, let’s do a test: we’ll set up two colonies of rats (the white, cute ones, not the grey mean ones, no matter how closely the latter resemble my critics). Colony A will receive electric shocks each time they refuse to perform risk analysis, enhanced communications practices, or adequate asset management, and will be rewarded with food pellets each time they are observed pursuing these objectives. Colony B will simply be fed the food pellets they retrieve at the end of the maze.

Care to bet which colony gets fat?