Many project managers are left-brain thinkers. We’re analytical. We’re get-r-done type folk. Give me the facts, man, and I’ll deliver your project, we say. Or, if we’re the one presenting the facts, we expect that they’ll deliver action by our project team contributors.
The science of the human brain, however, indicates that as humans, we take many ‘mental shortcuts’. Our decisions are not always rational.
A recent article in Scientific American has one of the most interesting titles of an article – at least in that esteemed journal: “The Science of Anti-Science Thinking”. The subtitle also caught my attention: “Convincing people who doubt the validity of climate change and evolution to change their beliefs requires overcoming a set of ingrained cognitive biases”.
The article starts with a porpoise. Porpoises live in the ocean. They look like a fish. Until fairly recently, most people thought they were a fish. But scientific evidence proved that they are a mammal, and that is now a fact.
When science – or at least technological advancement based on science – yields the automobile, the laser, the smartphone, or a cure for a disease, the advance is welcomed. But when science tells us something that disturbs the prevailing thought or challenges a societal norm, or, in projects, “that’s not the way we do things around here” – watch out. The human mind can slip quickly into mental shortcuts and biases.
In the article, which I highly recommend reading, there are some excellent examples and compelling evidence. But let me focus on the hurdles to accepting facts, since that (accepting facts) is what we need for good project management.
Shortcuts:
The brain is an organ. Organs use lots of energy and as a living thing, we try to reduce the energy we use – that’s instinct. On top of this, these days, we’re presented with an overload of information to process. So we take mental shortcuts – heuristics – rules of thumb – to cut down our processing time. One example in the article is the “Authority Heuristic”. In an experiment by psychiatrist Charles Hofling, nurses in a hospital received a phone call from a person identifying himself as a doctor, and directing the on-duty nurse to give their patient a double dose of a drug called Astroten to a patient, even though the label on the bottle boldly limited the dosage, and even though the hospital had a policy requiring handwritten prescriptions for such changes. 95% of the nurses obeyed the unknown “doctor” without raising any questions. See this link for more detail: https://www.simplypsychology.org/hofling-obedience.html. Other research in this area comes from Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman and his book “Thinking, Fast and Slow”, summarized well in the video below. It’s just a few minutes. Have a look.
These nurses, I think you’d agree, were using “System 1” thinking.
Confirmation Bias:
Even if you have the time to go to System 2 (slower, more disciplined) thinking, there is the chance that we won’t process information impartially. We will “mix in” our beliefs and give higher priority to the patterns we have seen more often and the ways in which we’ve always thought.
Social Goals:
Now let’s assume you have surpassed the hurdles of shortcuts (System 1 thinking) and confirmation bias, there is still something else that may prevent scientific fact from getting through. And that is “social pressure”. Group consensus is a strong thing. You’ve probably even seen it in your projects. “Everyone knows that Vendor XYZ is the best in the business”, says the ‘common wisdom’. Do the facts bear it out? If you don't think social pressure can make a difference, take a journey back in time and watch this old video from an American TV show called Candid Camera. It's about something called "The Asch Paradigm". You'll get a kick out of it.
All three of these hurdles get in the way of conveying real, factual information.
I bring this up for two reasons – first, to help readers understand why they may be pushing back on research showing that climate change is real and caused by humans, but even if you want to bypass that element, I also bring it up because as project managers need to work based on facts, and that as a PM you will often find yourself in the role of the conveyor of facts and faced with an audience or a functional manager who is taking mental shortcuts or is suffering from confirmation bias. At a minimum, you need to be aware of how information flows into, around, and back out of the human brain to accomplish your project objectives.
So: think fast, think slow, and consider the facts – including the facts about your own thinking!
