What’s Our Motivation?

 

During my last semester in High School I narrowly missed out on a drama scholarship to the University I was going to attend anyway.  Of course, to even be considered for such a prize, one had to spend a lot of time on-stage, in costume, pretending to be a different person, and speaking that person’s words as written down by the playwright. In order to perform well, the people on-stage had to have a good idea about what their character was about, why they thought the way they did, what made them tick … in essence, we needed to know the characters’ motivation for the role in the action being portrayed.

Flash forward to my time spent behind a podium, presenting papers or track courses on the topic of Project Management. As with being on-stage, a lot of people would pay good money to hear what I and the other conference/seminar presenters had to say. Unlike the stage, they weren’t there to be entertained, and we weren’t speaking other writers’ words. The peeps were there to hear about recent or overlooked research or advances in PM, and we selected presenters were there to give that to them.

Well, maybe.

Why are we here? (The non-existential version)

I found myself thinking about those radio advertisements where a person offers to teach you how to make a killing in the stock market. These “experts” claim to have discovered a highly formulaic approach to trading stocks and, for a fee, will share this approach with potential investors. Why would they do this? I mean, if you know a secret to making a lot of money in the stock market, why don’t you just continue to make a lot of money in the stock market? And, depending on the formula, one gets the sense that, if everyone was employing the identical approach, this approach would quickly cease to be lucrative. Stock markets, after all, are not money printing machines. Not everyone can buy low and sell high. So, why would these guys offer to sell their secret, when doing so is almost guaranteed to make it less effective the more the secret is disseminated?

Similarly, if I come across an idea that makes my organization far more effective in bringing in projects on-time, on-budget, why would I want to share this idea, particularly if my organization’s competitors might have employees in the room at the time I share the insight? If that’s not sufficiently suspect, consider this: I’m paying for the opportunity to help enlighten perfect strangers. Does this seem right?

This is the kind of effect that occurs when management science swerves away from genuine research that can establish causality. Consider the opposite alternative, that of a seminar presenter who does not have a genuine insight, but wants the audience to believe that he does. He will point to a particular process as representing an enlightened approach to PM, but will (predictably) be light in proving its connection to actual project success. Clearly there’s some other motivation in play here, and I think I know what it might be.

Always suspect free-lancing researchers

I think that there’s this idea out there that there are roving bands of powerful executives, each of whom desires to acquire a PM expert, and will pay handsomely for the right one. Such an idea is anathema to performers, but it acts like catnip on processors. I believe that the processors think that (a) if their pet process becomes widely accepted, and (b) they have become strongly associated as the subject matter expert in that particular process, they will (c) reap substantial benefits. Hence the seemingly endless paper presentations on some sort of process that can’t seem to firmly establish itself as the proximate (or even material) cause of project success.

Of course, it’s always dangerous to reverse-engineer motive based on outward behaviors, and I could easily be wrong in my speculations.  But ask yourselves – if you had a formulaic approach to consistently out-perform the competition in anything, and being known as the expert for a particular process was not your motive, how eager would you be to blab about it?