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Richard Maltzman
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Date
In the last post, I introduced the SMIRF. SMIRF® stands for Spending/Saving Money for Irrational Reasons Fallacy – . As stated in that post:
SMIRF project behaviors are in the name of ‘saving money’ and ‘staying on budget’, or in some cases, ‘being on time’ – especially in beating a competitor to market. When this happens, the project has become so narrowly driven by the cost and/or time constraint, that it consciously or subconsciously severs all ties with the objectives not only of the project, but the strategic goals, objectives, vision, and mission of the organization. This can be worse than the Sunk Cost Fallacy, because the outcomes are not simply wasted money, but potentially horrific events and impacts that affect people and planet.
There are unfortunately many examples of these events in our recent past, including the Columbia Gas of Massachusetts explosions in the Merrimack Valley, and the crashes of the Boeing 737 Max aircraft.
I won’t go into gory details of those two project disasters, in fact, there will be a book chapter devoted to them in an upcoming book to be published in 2022 by DeGruyter – The Responsible PM Handbook.
But briefly:
- Columbia Gas of Massachusetts, now defunct, changed their processes to save money, failed to communicate properly with subcontractors, and a severed pipe triggered tenfold pressure increases of natural gas to thousands of homes and businesses, resulting in 80 explosions and fires, a death, hundreds of injuries, and the demise of the company - read about the event in this Executive Summary from the US’ National Transportation Safety Board.
- Boeing’s 737 Max aircraft introduction was apparently rushed into production to allow competition with Airbus, resulted in two crashes, hundreds of deaths, a reputational nightmare for Boeing, the grounding of the aircraft, and a US$2.5B settlement. Netflix recently released Downfall, a documentary about this project. It’s tough but important viewing for project managers.
Both of these cases exemplify SMIRF-like behaviors by the organizations. What can a project manager do? Are we powerless?
Not completely. I’ll talk more in upcoming posts about speaking truth to power. In the meantime, it’s important to consider some practical tips. And here’s a source for those tips.
A publication of Harvard Business Review (HBR), Cultivating Everyday Courage, by James Detert (9 pages, $8.95) is all about the need – and the means – to speak up when decisions (in our case, project decisions) are being made that may be okay in the short term but which will quite obviously are counter to the mission statements of the organization. Columbia and Boeing are not evil corporations. But there was some SMIRFiness going on for sure.
To get an idea of what Detert is saying, literally, you can go to a 2018 HBR Ideacast (podcast) called Speaking Out Successfully. This is 21 minutes of worthwhile listening.
A sample:
INTERVIEWER: …it sounds like you’re saying this is also a problem for organizations because they’re basically hamstringing themselves by not letting people speak up?
JIM DETERT: Yeah. What’s at stake when people who are closest to customers, who or who know most about the underlying technologies, what’s at stake actually when, when they don’t tell you why customers aren’t going to like something or why a product isn’t going to work? You know, you actually don’t have to work that hard to estimate why it really does matter in a dollars-and-cents way. And not just the costs of, you know, the Wells Fargo type, you know, multibillion-dollar settlements. There are lots and lots of other costs.
Have a listen. And then consider if – when – and how – you should speak up!
Posted
by
Richard Maltzman
on: February 28, 2022 10:41 PM |
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