Do I Have A Transformation Story For You!

 

One of my pastimes is Kenpo Karate. I am, actually, a Black Belt, and in addition to working out and practicing the techniques and katas I also read about Kenpo and other styles of martial arts. I remember reading one teacher (okay, okay, sensei) who wrote a piece complaining about how some students would write him asking about the effectiveness of a certain style they had seen depicted in a television show or movie. These queries often followed a pattern of “I saw this character in this movie employ this style against other martial artists, and he really seemed to kick a$$!” The author of the piece would then remind the letter/e-mail writer that the reason the character did so well was because the people who wrote the script had him win the fight, and it really had little or nothing to do with the stated stylistic preferences of the protagonist. In retrospect, I can understand this instructor’s frustration. I mean, really, how obvious a refutation can there be? We Project Management types would never be so naïve as to fall for a similar ruse, would we?

Well, would we?

Meanwhile, Back In The Project Management World…

Eliyahu Goldratt published the novel – the novel! – Critical Chain in 1997. In this, ahem, novel the protagonist and his team realize remarkable project management success by using the “critical chain” approach, which is, essentially, the old Critical Path schedulers’ hack of crashing the schedule. Basically, the tactic involves transferring resources from non-critical activities onto critical ones in an attempt to optimize personnel output while reducing overall project duration. When it works it’s great, but there are some problems with this approach, to wit:

• If an analysis of assigning existing personnel to work more hours versus adding more people to the team has been performed, and the results indicate that more people are required, you just added costs to the project.
• On the other hand, if the analysis indicates that you can simply drive the existing team harder, it’s at least somewhat likely that they will burn out faster.
• On the third hand, if you haven’t performed this analysis, you’re making an uninformed decision with regards to personnel assignment, not the area you want making guesses to resolve.
• Finally, if the resources from the other tasks do not have the expertise to advance (or even assist) the activities on the critical path, the whole thing becomes futile from the get-go.

Naturally, none of these issues interferes with the “critical chain” technique as it’s employed in the story. It works great in the novel. It works so great, in fact, that the novel launched an entire “Critical Chain Project Management” academic trend. I feel like I’m in some kind of PM dojo, looking over hundreds of letters saying “Wow! That critical chain technique really worked out for everyone in that novel! Why isn’t it more widespread?” Guys! It worked in the novel because that’s the way the author scripted it! It’s a novel for crying out loud!
It happens elsewhere, too.

I really shouldn’t be too hard on Goldratt. B.F.Skinner published Walden Two, a novel about how an isolated society would easily out-perform others by employing the nascent theories of behaviorism, in 1946, a full twenty-five years before he published Beyond Freedom and Dignity, where he laid out the basics of behaviorism on a more academic basis. The temptation to lay out one’s theories about how things should work out in a fictional setting is fairly powerful. It’s also profoundly anti-scientific.

I didn’t write “non-scientific,” opting instead for “anti-scientific,” for a reason. In science, once a hypothesis is developed, one of the very first things the (valid) researcher does is to develop the Null Hypothesis, or the idea that, if proven true, would overturn or invalidate the original hypothesis. Only after the null hypothesis has been thoroughly disproven is the original hypothesis pursued to its logical conclusion. The fact that this level of academic and scientific rigor is completely absent from martial arts movies is readily understandable. Such movies are made to entertain, after all. Even in the various schools of psychology, one could squint really hard, and understand the allure of presenting the more philosophical notions in a fictional setting in order for them to gain traction later in an academic one.

But for the realm of management science, this fictionalization technique ought to be an automatic disqualifier. Now, with my super-sensitive ProjectManagement.com ears, I can hear GTIM nation saying “Well, what about all those stories with Stanly Raspberry? Isn’t he a fictional character weighing in on Project Management issues?” Indeed he is (it’s actually Stanly T. Raspberry), but what Stanly does is mock existing industry practices that I find mock-worthy, and have seen up-close and personal, but can’t (for various reasons) name the precise organizations engaged in them. Besides, Stanly has never advanced a novel theory about how PM ought to be done, and then have those who adopt such a theory succeed amazingly. It’s not what he’s about.

That kind of an approach resides with those who can’t establish their management science ideas through the scientific method. And neither Stanly T. Raspberry nor Kwai Chang Caine would be amused.