Governance as Narrative

 

In 1964, Ballantine Books published Eric Berne’s ground-breaking tome Games People Play, the Basic Handbook of Transactional Analysis. One of the more fascinating assertions Berne made was that we all have a narrative running inside our heads, a sort-of script that we are playing out. This narrative leads some to re-create parts of their life stories by manipulating people and engineering circumstances to re-live past victories or defeats: the victories for obvious reasons, and the defeats so that they can, this time, make the “correct” decision that overcomes their past pain. These narratives become part of us, so ingrained in our personas that we are barely aware that they even exist. Nevertheless, they have a powerful influence on the way we, well, govern ourselves.

Now, flash forward to the project team or PMO in need of “governance.” The managers or executives who provide this function almost certainly bring their individual narratives with them to this decision-structure-creating role. Now, before you dismiss all of this by saying “ah, c’mon Hatfield, we’re all quasi-prisoners of our own experiences – how is this a problem, really?”, I have one question: where did Groundhog Day (the celebration, not the movie) come from?

While farmers in Europe were known for making a habit of observing wild animals’ behaviors for clues on when they could expect the last freeze, the act of pulling a specific Marmota Monax from specific burrow and declaring that, based on the cloud cover that day, the weather can be accurately forecast is a uniquely American practice. I would speculate that, at some point in Western Pennsylvania’s past, somebody influential (or maybe many somebodies) observed a woodchuck coming out of his burrow on February 2^nd, and then (somewhat patiently, certainly) observed the next six weeks of weather, and made the (logical?) connection. It is this tendency to link otherwise unconnected events, that just happened to occur sequentially in time, that makes a logical wreck of our internal narratives.

As I point out in my recently-released, must-have book Game Theory in Management (I know it’s $50! It’s worth every penny – buy it already!) the natural tendency for us to take our internal narratives, which serve to explain to us how and why our histories unfolded the way they did, and then flip them forward to lead us to anticipate how our futures will unfold makes us extremely vulnerable to very bad management decisions. I once worked with a project manager who absolutely insisted on having what he called a “swim lane chart,” very early in the project. We PM-types would know his requested deliverable as a PERT Chart, arranged by performing organization. So convinced was he that this artifact was critical to project success, he demanded it as his top priority. When I tried to explain to him that, in order to create this chart, we would need to first create a Work Breakdown Structure, and then cross-connect it to an Organizational Breakdown Structure, and then key all of this information into a Critical Path-capable program, he tried to have me removed from the project. I guess common project management sense isn’t all that common. I’d also speculate that he was completely ignorant of the PM baseline groundwork that had to happen prior to his getting his precious “swim lane chart.” It just wasn’t in his narrative.

Now, incorporate Michael Maccoby’s Gamesman archetypes from his book The Gamesman[i]. In it, Maccoby asserted that there are four types of workers:

·         The Craftsman, who doesn’t really care too much for whom he works, but cares a great deal about the quality of his output.

·         The Company Man, who tends to assume the persona of the organization around him.

·         The Gamesman, who doesn’t perceive his benefits as food on his table or a roof over his head, but as markers in some grand game.

·         And the Jungle Fighter, who tends to get ahead by inflating their own contributions and minimizing their competitors (virtually everyone else), and minimizing their own failures while highlighting the shortcomings of their coworkers.

I would argue that, just as Maccoby was placing workers into these categories, he was also, essentially, placing their narratives in these bins, as well.  If this is the case, then, the implications are that, even if the people who are in charge of governance within your organization are (happily) not Jungle Fighters nor Company Men, then there is still a high likelihood that the narratives they bring with them are fraught with Groundhog Day-style misconnections, harkening back from their previous successes (or even failures – need to redeem that past, don't you know!). So, with all these vulnerabilities, is there a rational, clearly articulatable solution?

You bet there is! And it is…

…available in my book, or, eventually, in subsequent blogs.