Experience: The Best (Strikethrough) Worst PM Teacher

 

Yes, you read that right.

No, I’m not being reflexively iconoclastic, nor am I venting again about the overuse of clichés in business writing.

But here’s the thing about experienced Project Managers: projects are, by definition, one-off efforts. Of course, they are often similar to other projects, sometimes almost identically so. I also readily concede that many universal tactics, strategies and approaches are reliable, and should be employed. Experienced PMs often have a rather extensive array of technical approaches to their work assignments, and are usually right in their selections of said tech approaches. So, what’s the problem here, exactly?

Black swans. Black swans are the problem.

As originally articulated by Nassim Taleb in his best-selling book of the same name[i], a Black Swan event is one that has the following characteristics:

• It is unexpected and unpredictable,
• It has a significant impact, and
• After it has occurred, it’s almost universal human nature to believe that it could have been predicted, or at least planned for or mitigated.

The term gets its name from the discovery of black swans in Australia by the Dutch in 1697. Prior to that discovery, had you asked anybody in the world (outside of Australia) what color were swans, they would say “white,” since that was the only color of swans ever encountered. Had you pressed them further in this zoology quiz of 1696, and asked “Are you sure there are no orange, purple, green, or black swans?”, the answer would have been “Of course not.”

These types of events happen all the time, and projects are particularly susceptible to them, since they are, again by definition, novel. This being the case, the best PMs would be those who are able to have the most robust response to the unpredictable events that occur to the project, events that are not necessarily addressed by one of the canned strategies in that particular PM’s experience. Conversely, the worst PMs are going to be among the most experienced, who, nevertheless, cling to strategies that had worked on semi-analogous projects in the past, even when those strategies are clearly failing. In these cases the PMs' experience is actually working against them. They can easily become convinced that it’s not the technical approach to the unexpected problem that’s failing, but the Project Team’s reluctance to accept the flawed approach, or some other organizational factor (here we often hear of “cultural” issues, or “resistance to change”). As the repeatedly failed strategy is employed over and over again, the Project Team becomes less willing to execute it, reinforcing the PM’s notion that it’s the fault of the team and not the strategy. I’ve seen this tailspin ruin many a project.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, PMs have to deal with a factor they may not have heard of (unless they read my books or this blog), that of Metcalf’s Law. In short, Metcalf’s Law is the basis for much of Network Theory, with its main offshoot being the notion that very small variances in some nodes in an extensive network can have a cascading effect and deliver substantial, or even catastrophic impacts on other nodes, or even the entire network. It’s also known as the Butterfly Effect, encapsulated by the question “If a butterfly flaps its wings in Brazil, does it cause a hurricane in Texas?” Like Black Swan events, they are both significant in consequence, and utterly unpredictable.

Here’s where the risk managers come in. If they were to be completely intellectually honest, they would admit that what they are doing is monetizing the fear that PMs have of encountering Black Swan events, or being caught flat-footed by a cascading impact that began as a small perturbation. Consider also one of the main tools used in modern risk analysis, the generation of ordinal scales. Often presented as a grid, with an estimate of the probability of a given future event on one axis and its “impact” on the other, ordinal scales are obviously based on the experience of the analysts filling it out. Not only is personal experience highly variable from one risk analyst to the next, but memory is also inconstant. We tend to remember things we like to remember, and forget those that we don’t, even if those experiences have a direct bearing on the accuracy of the experienced-based risk assessment grid.

By overworking analyses based on Gaussian Curves, risk managers provide … well, what, exactly? Because generating stochastic ranges on things that might happen with their associated estimated impacts does absolutely nothing to stave off either scenario. It’s simply a reflection of what the experience of the risk analysts leads them to assert what they think the PM ought to worry about.

Essentially, the canny PM will know that experience isn’t always the best teacher. In fact, it’s often not even a friend.

[i] Taleb, Nassim Nicholas, The Black Swan; The Impact of the Highly Improbable, Random House, 2007.