Project Management, Bacteria and Cancer Cells

 

The Keynote presentation I attended this morning with futurist Anne Skare Nielsen was very inspiring. Nielsen's presentation,"The Era of Constructive Visions Has Begun—Are You Coming?" was spot on. Her message really resonated with me, she talked about how success in the future is not about "more" but is about "better." She describes a shift in paradigm from "human doings" to "human beings." I think this really applies to how we should be thinking as project leaders.

Not unlike some of the opinions we share in this forum she suggests that people aren't motivated as much by money or other external rewards but are really motivated by challenging and interesting projects. I have found this to be true throughout my career. The members of our project teams really desire to contribute to something greater than themselves—our job is to facilitate the kind of environment where they can.

To do that, we need to worry less about doing more and more. We need to focus on doing better. On creating more value for our customers and more value for our organizations. The last few years have conditioned many business leaders to expect more and more out of their people. Unfortunately, this has created an environment that stifles creativity and makes it difficult for team members to creatively solve problems, and ultimately handicaps their ability to help organizations succeed.

As we lead project teams, we need to make a shift toward a more people-centric approach that shuns excessive process for the sake of process and a command-and-control management model that just doesn't work. We must give team members the opportunity to contribute at a higher level and maximize their contribution to the organization.

Will making this change be easy? Probably not. But the alternative is irrelevance or worse. Nielsen's background is biology and she asserts, "There are only two organisms that don't evolve and change, bacteria and cancer cells."

What are you doing to avoid being either?