Beware The Butterfly’s Wings

 

Edward Lorenz (1918-2008) was preparing to give a talk at the 139^th meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science on the theory that very small variations in certain nodes of a network or parameters in complex equations can have rather large consequences in the outcomes or effects in those environs, but he couldn’t come up with a title. Phillip Merilees suggested the now-famous “Does the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas?[i],” and the summarizing title stuck. As counter-intuitive as it may sound, the short answer to the question is “quite possibly.”

Metcalfe’s Law also deals with the potential behavior of large networks. Originally intended to address telecommunications design, it demonstrates that, while two telephones have one connection, five telephones have 66 connections. The actual formula is:

C = (n*(n-1))/2

Where C is the number of connections, and n is the number of nodes in the network. While not a geometric progression, the number of connections per added node grows at a significant pace above an arithmetic rate, implying that the larger the network, the more powerful and unpredictable it becomes.

Meanwhile, Back in the Project Management World…

Most Project Managers rightly dread the prospect of cataclysmic effects overwhelming their ability to bring a project in on-time and on-budget, which is probably the main driver behind the pseudo-science of modern risk management. While overuse of statistical analysis techniques will not reduce the odds of such project-killing events occurring, there are some things a typical PM can do to help avoid such failures, and they are things as common to us as flapping butterflies’ wings. But first, a quick distinction: forces that are purely external to your project that have the power to either wreck the project or have a significant deleterious effect on its performance are not predictable, period. Yes, you can worry about them, and even put down your worries in a Monte Carlo simulator and call it “risk management,” but you haven’t done a thing to reduce the likelihood of their occurrence. But many of the internal aspects of disaster avoidance can be addressed. A short list follows.

• Cronyism and nepotism. Whenever anybody is hired or promoted on a basis other than merit, this butterfly wing-flap doesn’t happen just once. It happens each and every time the improperly hired/promoted person makes a decision related to the organization’s performance, which is to say virtually every hour of every day. You see, when such a hire/promotion takes place, not only does a poorer performer get placed into a decision-making role, the individual who merited that role has been pushed aside, to either assume a position of subservience in the existing organization, or else to be made available to the competition. It’s only a matter of time before the improperly hired/promoted individual makes a less-than-optimal decision of such consequences that a cascading event occurs, overwhelming either the specific project being worked, or even the entire organization.
• Poor Management Information System (MIS) strategy. My oft-cited version of the Pareto Principal as it relates to PM, that the 80^th percentile best managers who have access to 20% of the information needed to obviate a given decision will be out-performed by the 20^th percentile worst managers with access to 80% of the information so needed, carries with it several implications. Perhaps the most profound is that, if the Program Management Office (PMO) insists on pursuing information streams that are ultimately irrelevant (e.g., comparing budgets to actuals at the line-item level; time-phasing the Estimate to Complete; performing a [or even multiple] “bottoms-up” Estimates at Completion), then the unfortunate project teams who have to comply with these diversions will be wasting their MIS investment in time and money, making absolutely no progress towards the percentage of information they need to make better decisions. As in the previous example, it’s only a matter of time before the bow-wave of poor decisions swamps the project team, virtually guaranteeing cataclysmic project failure.
• There are many other examples (a “Peter Principle” promoting of the inept; the avoidance or even punishment of any negative feedback from the project team; allowing Asset Managers to determine Project Management actions, to name but three), but with the space I have left I would like the reader to consider what kind of cascading error effect would be had by combining the previous two bullets. With improperly-placed and inept project management “experts” chasing utterly irrelevant but difficult-to-assemble information systems, not only are valuable resources being wasted, and not only are the better people, information systems, and options being displaced, but the 20% worst managers are not even being fed 20% of the information they need to make optimal – or even functional – decisions. It’s inevitable – many bad, often very bad, choices will be made within this project team.

And that, friends, is a recipe for disaster.

[i] Butterfly effect. (2017, September 10). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 18:41, September 17, 2017, from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Butterfly_effect&oldid=799973299