Overcoming the Dreaded Slow Roll

 

In my blog from two weeks ago, I promised to present a way to advance a given capability (in this case, project management) within an organization following the structure inherent in Carnegie Melon University’s Software Engineering Institute’s (SEI’s) Capability Maturity Model® while avoiding the dreaded “slow roll” (Professor Bud Baker’s term) or silent veto, and that this method had its roots in game theory. But then, in last week’s blog, I took advantage of the occasion of Kristen Wiig hosting Saturday Night Live to lambast their writers for being highly formulaic in their sketch-writing, so it falls to this, the last week of May (and May’s theme) to provide this answer. And the answer is…

…rooted in Game Theory, like I said before, specifically the game known as the Prisoner’s Dilemma. There are various versions of the Prisoner’s Dilemma, the most common being that you are in a situation where you are in prison, and your jailer tells you that if you rat out (inform on) your cell-mate, he will reduce your sentence. Problem is, you know your cell mate will receive the same offer. There are four possible outcomes:

·         You both rat on each other, and both serve 11 years.

·         Neither of you rats on the other, and you both serve 18 months.

·         You do not inform on your cell-mate, but he informs on you. You serve 18 years, and your cell-mate walks free (this is known as the “sucker’s payoff”).

·         Similarly, you inform on your cell-mate, but he does not inform on you. You walk, and your cell-mate gets 18 years.

Conventional wisdom on the Prisoner’s Dilemma had the best tactic as always ratting out your cell-mate in order to avoid being on the receiving end of the Sucker’s Payoff.

In the 1980s, Robert Axelrod hosted a tournament for competing computer programs playing 200 iterations of the Prisoner’s Dilemma. As  you can imagine, programs employing all manner of strategies were entered, some, keeping with traditional wisdom, informing on the other program every time, others ratting out the first fifty times, but not the next one hundred and fifty, and so forth. One program, submitted by Anatol Rapaport and called Tit for Tat, won the tournament handily. The Tit for Tat program employed the following strategy:

·         The first iteration, it cooperated (did not inform).

·         Thereafter, it did whatever the other program did in the previous iteration.

After Tit for Tat won the overall tournament, some analysts tinkered with its underlying strategy, and developed versions that, say, cooperated the first five times, and then did the tit for tat thing, or else started off by ratting, and then going into the tit for tat strategy, but the alternates always lost to the original. So, the analysis yielded three primary reasons why Tit for Tat won the tournament:

·         It was initially nice – it cooperated the first iteration.

·         It retaliated immediately for defection.

·         It forgave completely and immediately for cooperation.

Many years after I had read the original analysis, and was trying to crack the nut of how to get past people in the organization who were opposed to the advancement of a particular capability by slow-rolling or silent veto, the solution hit me like a thunderclap. In the advancement of a capability (again, in this case, PM) within the macro organization, you really aren’t trying to get everybody to “do” project management: you’re really attempting to get them to cooperate, or at least not defect in the technical program that you are pursuing. It then falls to reason that, in order to secure that cooperation, the implementation phase of the capability maturation program should act like Tit for Tat:

·         It has to be falling-off-a-log easy to plug-and-play.

·         “Retaliate” is a bit strong, but you must be able to identify and respond immediately whenever anyone directly associated with participating in the implementation effort attempts to defect.

·         If the participants are cooperating, then they are golden, even if they are sending you schlock data. Better data can be taught – cooperation can’t.

Following these three steps won’t guarantee a successful implementation, but they will maximize your odds of one. Of course, there are many other factors that can derail your efforts, but I believe having an overall strategy that incorporates these three will improve your chances significantly.