Freud, The Battle Of Cannae, And The PMO

 

On August 2, 216 BC, during the second Punic War, Roman consuls Lucius Aemilius Paullius and Gaius Terentius Varro led an army of over 80,000 men against a Carthagian force of around 50,000, led by Hannibal, at Cannae, a village on the southeastern part of the Italian peninsula. Due to an anomaly in the rules of command in the army of the Roman Republic, command of the Romans actually alternated day by day between Paullius and Varro, and history records Varro as having been in command on August 2^nd. Typically, when Roman forces had an adversary outnumbered to this extent, victory would be all but assured, regardless of who was in command. Unfortunately for the Republic, this would be a very a-typical confrontation. Without getting into the gory details, the Romans lost somewhere between 45,000 and 70,000 men killed, while Hannibal lost around 8,000. Cannae is considered to be one of the most lopsided, complete military victories in history. Since the battle took place on an open plain, it’s fairly obvious that the Romans were poorly commanded, despite their numerical superiority. Whether or not Paullius could have managed an order of battle better than Varro is pure speculation, other than the fact that it’s hard to imagine a worse handling of the forces than the one Varro produced. Kind of makes me wonder if those soldiers marching into battle had any misgivings about the whole odd-days-Paullius-is-in-command, other times it’s Varro arrangement. As canned strategies go, this one was pretty lame.

Meanwhile, Back In The Freudian Psychology World…

Sigmund Freud and his daughter Anna asserted the existence of ego defense mechanisms, defined as:

Defense mechanisms are psychological strategies that are unconsciously used to protect a person from anxiety arising from unacceptable thoughts or feelings. According to Freudian theory, defense (mechanisms) involve a distortion of (reality) in (some) way so that we are better able to cope with a situation.[i]

Among the ego defense mechanisms that may have a bearing on the PM World (or on the Battle of Cannae, for that matter) is one entitled rationalization, defined as:

Rationalization is a defense mechanism proposed by Anna Freud involving a cognitive distortion of “the facts” to make an event or an impulse less threatening. We do it often enough on a fairly conscious level when we provide ourselves with excuses.[ii] 

Varros was one of the few Romans who survived the Battle of Cannae. How, exactly, he explained his crushing, nation-endangering defeat to himself or to others is not noted in history, but he must have done a pretty good job of rationalizing it. There’s no record of his suffering any rebuke or career reversal as a result.

Meanwhile, Back In The Project Management World…

Have you ever been in a PMO where the head honcho seems to have walked into the office with his technical agenda already set, before he or she is even aware of the strengths and weaknesses of the PMO Team itself, much less the macro-organization taken as a whole? I have written in previous blogs of the axiom Affordability, Quality, Availability: pick any two, and how at the very least the person formulating the PMO’s implementation strategy needs to consider which two aspects to emphasize, and which one to give short-shrift. The alternative – to attempt to pursue all three aspects simultaneously – is simply a recipe for disaster. The first time a significant problem arises with, say, quality, the PMO head will focus on correcting it, usually by committing more resources to the problem. When those resources are unavailable for other demands, the PMO head will pivot to attracting more talent, which drives costs up, making the PMO’s services less affordable. Another pivot to addressing escalating costs, and the quality problems resurface, on and on, like a massive business model version of the old whack-a-mole arcade game.

As the downward spiral increases in intensity, so, too, will the tendency for the PMO head to rationalize away the causes of these difficulties, and the most common target is the macro-organization for being too recalcitrant to accept the technical agenda and implementation strategy offered up by the PMO.  It’s classic Freudian rationalization. The difficulties simply can’t be due to the poor technical agenda/implementation approach that didn’t even take into account the affordability-quality-availability paradigm, no siree. It simply must be due to the ignorance or organizational resistance of the rubes in the extant organization, failing to recognize the advanced capabilities of the PMO head. Yeah, that must be it.

So, What Did We Learn From This Little Foray Into Roman History And Freudian Psychology?

Well, a few things, including:

• When the person setting the PMO’s technical agenda is using a canned strategy, without taking into account the new circumstances, the nature of the macro-organization, or skill set of the team, this strategy is almost guaranteed to fail,
• …especially if that canned strategy does not take into account which of the quality/affordability/availability characteristics are most important to the present situation.
• When it does, in fact, fail, the director of the PMO will tend to blame the very macro-organization that he neglected to adequately assess prior to the implementation attempt, engaging in the ego defense mechanism of rationalization. After all, look at all of the published guidance that agreed with him!
• If the person setting the technical agenda for the PMO received that assignment because it was “his turn,” or for any other reason than a record of success in highly analogous situations, then the attempt will almost certainly end badly.

But, somehow, Varros such PMO directors survive, and often don’t suffer any consequences. Odd, isn’t it?

[i] McLeod, S. A. (2019, April 10). Defense mechanisms. Simply Psychology. www.simplypsychology.org/defense-mechanisms.html.

[ii] Ibid.