Wait…What If I Don’t Want To Be Included?

 

One of the main reasons that the United States declared war on Great Britain in 1812 had to do with the impressment of American seamen. So desperate was the Royal Navy for crews that they resorted to intercepting American-flagged shipping on the high seas, and would essentially kidnap sailors to help man their vessels. To be fair, such actions weren’t that different from the nominal recruiting techniques for actual subjects to the Crown, as many a young man living in a deep-water English port would abruptly discover. But the young United States was rather put off by this, and decided to push back in dramatic fashion. The War of 1812 would, somewhat uncharacteristically for the time, result in no transfer of land ownership either way, but did succeed in gaining some measure of relief from the practice of “recruiting” American seamen to man British vessels.

Meanwhile, Back In The Project Management World…

Much of the discussion of the word “inclusion” in a business sense has centered on the idea that a deserving person has been unfairly excluded from some organization or team, but what about the opposite scenario? Let’s start by focusing on this term’s main denotative meaning, to wit:

in-clu’sion, …n., …1. Act of including, or state of being included.

This is the definition from Webster’s New International Dictionary, Unabridged, originally published in 1934, with new words added in 1939 and 1945. The thing weighs 15.8 pounds, which by itself speaks to its authority. Based on this definition, let’s employ one of the Game Theorists’ favorite tools, the Payoff Grid, as it applies to inclusion/exclusion in the formation of Project Teams:

If Project Team member X should not have been made part of the Team, and hasn’t been, then everything’s okay. Similarly, if they should have been included, and have been, it’s also okay. Much of the literature on the subject of inclusion focuses on Scenario A1, so I won’t bother to add to that volume of analysis.

But I believe a significant percentage of us PM-types have found ourselves in Scenario B2, due to an acquisition, merger, or changing out of an executive team. These times of organizational upheaval are almost always accompanied by a change in management strategy and business philosophy in addition to the transformation of the organization’s executive lineup, and those changes commonly create issues far more significant and long-lived than can be resolved through a nominal Tuckman Forming-Storming-Norming-Performing cycle. For example, should the new executive team arrive with something they view as a strong PM culture, they may be given to viewing any deviation from their business world view in the new organization as an indicator of backwardness, or lack of a key capability. Even in those circumstances where the newcomers’ business model could use some tweaking to make it compatible with the host organization, attempts to articulate the case for such an adjustment may well be viewed, not as an insightful attempt to help, but as a sign of disloyalty to the new management structure. This, in turn, can lead to a whole plethora of additional business model pathologies, including:

• An “us versus them” view among the newcomers and extant personnel,
• Promotions and raises based on clan identification/membership, rather than merit,
• …which, taken together, breeds mistrust within the Project Teams affected,
• …causing disruptions in vital communications avenues at crucial times in the Projects’ life-cycle,
• …leading to poorer performance than had been realized prior to the management change-up,
• …exacerbating the whole “us versus them” view.

GTIM Nation is familiar with the old saw “Affordability, Availability, Quality – pick any two.” As a bit of extension,

• An affordable good or service that’s available immediately is unlikely to be of high quality;
• A high-quality product that’s available right now is not likely to be cheap, and
• A high-quality product that’s affordable will almost always involve a lead time to acquire.

Now imagine two organizations within the same industry, suddenly brought together under the same Organizational Breakdown Structure. In addition to the asset managers seeking to eliminate redundant functionality or facilities, it’s highly likely that these two organizations came by their market share via different business models with respect to the axiom cited above. What’s basic to one org is dopey to the other, and vice versa. What’s the impressed seaman suddenly included PM to do?

Of course, all such occurrences come with a vast array of relevant parameters, making a one-size-fits-all response impossible. But if I were to recommend a broad-brush strategy, it would be this: focus on your Project Team, and its scope. “Nothing succeeds like success” goes the old saying, and those Project Teams that bring in their scope on-time, on-budget can only be ignored by the most clannish of executive teams.

For those who are not in a position to establish relative worth through performance, consider that it could be worse. The Royal Navy didn’t ban flogging as a disciplinary tactic until 1880[i].

[i] Retrieved from https://militaryhistorynow.com/2012/06/29/this-is-gonna-hurt-military-punishment-throughout-the-ages/ on August 30, 2021, 14:10 MDT.