The Price Of Snake Oil Outside Of North America

 

Aristotle’s “ingredients for persuasion,” or “appeals,” the basis for creating an argument, were as follows:

• Pathos, from where we get the modern term “pathetic,” is an appeal to feeling, or emotion. The tip-off: use of the term “I feel,” particularly “I feel very strongly about this…” Pathos is not considered a valid argument.
• Ethos is an appeal to a person’s level of expertise or authority, either the speaker or some other individual. It’s not necessarily a poor type of argument; but, as we will see, it does have its pratfalls. And it is most certainly not…
• Logos, where we get the current term “logic,” is an appeal to verifiable facts and structured arguments, and is the foundation for the scientific method. The verifiable facts are observable and repeatable in an experimental setting (or, at the very least, agreed to by all participants in the debate), and become premises. Conclusions follow from the premises based on structures that can be verified as valid, such as:
  • All As are Bs.
  • No Bs are Cs.
  • Therefore, no As can be Cs.

Valid conclusions can then become premises in more advanced or complex logical arguments.

Where have we heard this before?

My regular readers are well aware by now that one of my recurring themes is the hazards being introduced into the project management community by what I perceive is a move away from management science based upon, well, actual science, and towards hypotheses predicated more on traditional business theories, on the opinions of those either in academia or PM practitioners. Such ideas are based on ethos, and not pathos. These practitioners may or may not have a valid understanding of basic causality, much less the precise reasons behind their projects’ successes or failures. Look at the presentation schedule of a typical Earned Value Management System seminar, and you will see a cavalcade of talks and paper presentations that are little more than kabuki theater versions of ethos-derived stories of how such-and-such a project was successful due to the team’s observance of traditional PM business theory, or else presentations with a content that could have been written 30 years ago. There’s rarely anything new in the way of datum or research proffered.

I was once involved in an effort to create a guidance document on a certain aspect of cost performance measurement, and one of the other contributors tried to insist that his ideas should be considered preeminent because he had done some PM-related work outside of North America, and should, therefore, be considered an “internationally recognized expert.” I swear I am not making this up. No new research he had conducted, no possible technical challenge to existing theory, none of that. He had his passport stamped, so the rest of us were supposed to shut up and put him in charge, I suppose. It represented the most blatant example of self-importance-driven PM hypotheses advancement that I had ever observed; sadly, it wouldn’t be the last.

About that superfluous complexity…

Two weeks ago I blogged about invalid theories being advanced from traditional, academic sources, predicated on the asset managers’ take on the world of business. Last week I complained about invalid theories being advocated by people calling themselves project management experts. What do these drivers of needless complexity have in common? Their appeal, not to facts and logic, but to their authors’ own level of expertise, however artificially derived that level may be.

When David Christensen and Scott R. Heise published their findings about Cost Performance Index stability,[i] they drew their conclusions from data gleaned from hundreds of projects. Now, that’s real management science. Quick – when was the last time you heard a communications expert, while insisting on the “engagement of stakeholders,” appeal to any real data? Or even a citation of the number of successful projects that did so, as compared to unsuccessful ones that did not, while even making a token attempt at controlling for the dependent variables? (Can a level or degree of “stakeholder engagement” even be objectively measured?) I never have. Not once. Nor have I ever heard or read any similar attempt by risk management experts as they insist that all PMs include a robust risk management program, or those who demand “bottoms-up” Estimates at Completion, or of a dozen other PM-flavored hypotheses being pushed by these so-called experts. They never seem to base these ideas on facts or logic; rather, they assert these appeal-to-authority ideas, and then pretend that anyone who opposes them or their ideas is some kind of rube. Since these hypotheses are not logically derived, the opportunities for them to be inconsistent (or even contradictory) lead directly to added levels of superfluous complexity within the commonly-held body of PM knowledge.

And, just to be clear, this is not how any science (particularly management science) is advanced.

It’s how snake oil is sold.

[i] Christensen, David, and Heise, Scott R., Cost Performance Index Stability,  National Contract Management Journal, 1992.