A Sound Of PM Thunder

 

In the June 1952 issue of Collier’s magazine was a short story by famed Science Fiction author Ray Bradbury entitled “A Sound of Thunder.” Set in the year 2055, when time travel is available, big game hunter Eckels pays Time Safari to take him back more than 60 million years in the past in order to kill a Tyrannosaurus Rex. Travis, the guide from Time Safari, lays out some very strict rules for the hunters, including the need to stay on a levitating path that keeps the time-travelling hunters from interacting with the late Cretaceous environment. Travis points out that even the slightest change to the environment could have a cascading effect, impacting the hunting parties’ present. For those who haven’t read the story (or seen the film), SPOILER ALERT! that’s exactly what ends up happening after Eckels strays off of the path and accidentally steps on a single butterfly.

I find the use of the accidentally-killed butterfly to be fascinating, in that Edward Norton Lorenz would not describe the Chaos Theory building block, The Butterfly Effect, for another seventeen years.[i] The Butterfly Effect essentially posits that even very small perturbations within an interconnected network can have non-linear, even catastrophic impacts on the other parts of the network, often illustrated by the question “If a butterfly flaps its wings in Brazil, does it cause a hurricane in Texas?” Bradbury’s use of the butterfly image is a poignant way to offer up a treatment almost never seen in the multitude of movies and books that include time travel in their plots, namely that we really have no idea what would ensue if a particular historic variable were to be altered. Virtually all of the other works of fiction that deal with the question show the protagonists’ actions in their historic venues to have the effect of correcting a mistake in the time period from whence they came, with the theory of Unintended Consequences only making a rare appearance. It’s a deeply-held human conceit, I suppose, that we can possess a complete and comprehensive knowledge of the causal links that exists among events that occur in sequential order, and can correctly identify the impact of such decision points on their eventual outcomes.

Meanwhile, Back In The Project Management World…

After the newly-minted PMP® receives their certificate in the mail and has inserted it into a frame, the thought that there’s more to success in the PM world than what was taught in the certification-prep classes invariable enters their thinking. Probably the largest sector of this undiscovered country resides in the Organizational Behavior and Performance realm, which largely resembles Bizarro World from Superman. Are you encountering unreasonable resistance from Finance and Accounting to implementing even a basic Earned Value Management System? Bizarro World. Does every single Control Account Manager (CAM) insist that their work is strictly level of effort? Bizarro World.

But certainly one of the leading citizens of management’s version of Bizarro World is the representative of those holding to the idea that a complete and comprehensive knowledge of the causal links that exist among events that occur in sequential order can be correctly identified, along with the impact of such decision points on their eventual outcomes. Don’t misunderstand – I’m not knocking experience. Seasoned PMs are far more likely to make the correct decisions in an environment of incomplete information than rookies. No, it’s not the PMs I’m taking on here. It’s the Management Information Systems that are supposed to be informing those decisions. And the most common MIS used in the Project Management World that is predicated on the idea that the causal links that exist among events that occur in sequential order can be quantified and evaluated? That’s right, it’s the risk register, relentlessly pushed as essential by our old friends, the risk managers (no initial caps).

To prove my point, compare and contrast what happens during a typical risk event evaluation session with the examples available on-line, from major Universities, for calculating dependent risk. For the latter, examples usually include coin-flipping, dice-rolling, or other, limited-possible-outcome scenarios, which also have the advantage of having clearly mutually exclusive outcomes. One can’t pull anything other than a red or black playing card from a standard deck, for example.

However, in creating risk registers, subject matter experts are invited to offer up alternative events to those expected in the baselined management approach, and guess estimate both their odds of occurrence, and cost/schedule impact. These are then (usually) binned into categories pertaining to whether or not the events being considered are mutually exclusive, dependent in some way, or purely independent. But even this binning can’t be considered absolute, or even roughly reliable. Is there a risk event citing a 15% chance of increased vendor costs causing an 8% increase in budget? How can it be quantified, or even known, if this cost increase is passed along to any or all of the Project’s other suppliers? We’re not even remotely close to the type of closed systems where such calculations can be effective. Instead, the Project risk-evaluation environment far more closely resembles the levitating path for time-travelling Tyrannosaurus hunters, where the slightest change in parameters can have a cascading effect, rendering the very basis for modelling management decisions invalid.

And if accidentally stepping on a butterfly can utterly change the world, then just imagine what far more impactful things can do to just our projects.

[i] Wikipedia contributors. "Edward Norton Lorenz." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 5 Jan. 2021. Web. 18 Jan. 2021.