Leading, Or Trailing Edge?

 

As GTIM Nation is aware, I don’t believe that any discussion of leading-edge trends and technologies in Project Management (ProjectManagement.com’s theme for March) can deliver insight without first considering Thomas Kuhn’s seminal work The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (University of Chicago Press, 1962). Yeah, I know that practitioners of the hard sciences tend to wince at the term “management science,” and rightfully so; but, to the extent that management science advances in ways analogous to real science, it follows that discussions on March’s theme must start with this work. Some key takeaways include:

• While Kuhn referenced Karl Popper’s falsifiability as a key component in the advancement of science, he also emphasized the notion of verifiability, which essentially posits that meaningful assertions must be supported by hard data (enough with the surveys about how people feel about PM within their companies!) or valid logical deduction.
• Coherence is another significant theme in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. While Kuhn used the term to advocate for a logical structure to any given theory, I would like to adapt it in PM space to mean that an internal consistency must be present in any PM-themed guidance document. I’ll go further and state that any PM guidance document that has within it a singular inconsistency or lack of coherence should be eliminated from the overarching Project Management codex.
• One last theme I would like to lift from Kuhn is incommensurability, or the idea that, as scientific theories are hypothesized, tested, accepted, challenged, overturned, and ultimately replaced, the theory doing the replacing is utterly incompatible with the previous one.

Meanwhile, Back In The Project Management World…

Since I’ve spent gallons of pixel ink on the first bullet, and the affliction of a priori statements making up the overwhelming majority of what is considered innovative or cutting-edge Project Management, I’ll continue on to the next two.

One of my favorite objections to the way risk management (no initial caps) is currently practiced is the fact that none of the publications I’ve seen on the topic seems to be able or willing to determine that discipline’s outer limits. One well-known writer on the subject used to insist (he may still) that risk management encompasses all events that impact projects, positive or negative, with “positive risk” serving as some sort of stand—in for the word “opportunity.” Obviously, a specific management discipline that claims to pertain to all events having an impact on project performance has no epistemological limits whatsoever, which is not only incoherent (literally), it is absurd.

By moving on to incommensurability I get the opportunity to address another one of my favorite targets, our friends the accountants. That asset management theory continues to dominate executive thinking and college-level business schools is clearly shown by the fact that the assertion that the point of all management is to “maximize shareholder wealth” is not only nearly universally taught, it’s considered something near-lunacy to contradict this axiom. Even their jargon has wormed its way into idiomatic English (e.g., the “bottom line” no longer refers just to the end of a profit-and-loss statement, but is analogous to an ultimate summation of any discussion or analysis). This is where our favorite organization, the Project Management Institute®, comes in to play.

Like it or not, PMI® is Copernicus to the accountant’s Ptolemy. The notion that there is a type of management, distinct from finance and accounting theory, that is focused on the customers’ parameters of cost, scope, and schedule, and has little or nothing to do with short-term maximizing of shareholder wealth is not only contradictory to the “maximize shareholder wealth” paradigm, it directly contradicts it. Like our friends the risk managers (no initial caps), the asset managers (also no initial caps) were unwilling or unable to set an epistemological limit to their theories. Perhaps the best way to demonstrate the intellectual vacuity of the two positions would be to get the risk and asset managers’ thought leaders in the same room, and let them answer the following question: if risk management covers all events that occur to a project, and the point of all management is to maximize shareholder wealth, which of y’alls’ techniques should take precedence in the information feed to any given project-centric organization’s management team? Announce that the winning position will be awarded premium positions for their adherents in the world’s premier business schools, and that they have 24 hours to resolve the question. Just to be on the safe side, ambulatory care should be provided.

To be fair, I’m not gloating that PM is destined to overturn existing paradigms in management science. I would, though, like to point out that the currently prevailing management theory has been in place for around 400 years. In another 400 years’ time, if that era’s management science theorists want to overturn the assertions in this blog, they are perfectly welcome.