Managing the Dystopia Project

 

I find myself thinking about the horror film genre, not because it’s near Halloween, and not because I like watching them (I don’t), but in the sense of trying to understand their attraction or, more precisely, where they derive their fascination among those who do like to watch them. The slasher ones are easy – nobody wants to be killed with a knife, particularly one wielded by a person wearing a hockey, “scream,” pin-head, or whatever that thing that “Jason” wears-type mask, all while seemingly able to walk through walls, unerringly know when a protagonist is alone and vulnerable, and is capable of surviving all manner of gruesome deaths themselves. Certainly the more complex sub-genre of these movies has to do with a description of a dystopian future, one where most people face extremely difficult daily challenges to simply survive due to some catastrophic failure of economics, foreign affairs, ecology, or … technology.

That we may experience in our lifetimes an economic downturn, war, or extreme weather event is scary, no doubt. But there’s just something about technology gone awry that’s frightening at a higher level. Robot butlers look really cool, until they band together to either enslave or wipe out humanity (I, Robot; the entire Terminator franchise, among many others). Curing disease is certainly noble, until non-human animals become the apex planetary species as an unintended consequence (Planet of the Apes franchise, Species, etc.). And let’s not forget the fears of self-aware supercomputers combined with advances in nuclear weapons technology becoming the ultimate buzz-kill (Colossus: The Forbin Project, etc.). These fictitious scenarios have a real fascination to them, unequalled by sharks, mummies, vampires, or werewolves in that, as unpleasant as interacting with any of these might be, they simply don’t rise to the level of creating a universal dystopian future for large swaths of the Earth’s population.

Meanwhile, Back In The Project Management World…

Have you ever noticed that, whenever an action/thriller movie features some type of technology that gets out-of-hand, it’s the Project Manager that’s usually tagged as the antagonist? For example, in Jurassic World (2015), in the dinosaur-themed park that must have required thousands and thousands of people to create and maintain, somehow the head of security, Vic Hoskins (played by Victor D’Onofrio) is the ultimate bad-guy for seeking to weaponize the critters when they (of course) escape their confines. In the aforementioned Colossus: The Forbin Project, the head designer/PM, Dr. Charles Forbin, is called out in the title of the movie, along with the fact that they specified that it’s about a project. I recognize we’re talking about fiction, but, in real-life analogous situations, you could be fairly confident that neither the designers of the dinosaur enclosures nor the person who thought it would be a swell idea to let Colossus communicate with Guardian (the President of the United States) would get nearly as much blame as Hoskins or Forbin for the ensuing disasters. When the technology works, its inventors/discoverers are heroes. When it causes widespread suffering, well, the PM should have had better motives, or more respect for the technology, dontchaknow.

All of which points to a new rule I want to add to Hatfield’s Incontrovertible List of Project Management Axioms, that it’s the Project Managers who are seen (rightfully) as being the person ultimately responsible for an activity’s actual outcome, whether it was part of the original plan or not. For example, when the aforementioned cloned dinosaurs start sprinting out of their clearly sub-standard enclosures, you wouldn’t expect to hear from the Asset Managers on the topic of the wisdom of awarding the barrier construction project to the lowest bidder. Nor would it seem plausible that the Strategic Managers would select that moment to remind everyone how a zoological park featuring facsimiles of animals long-extinct AND extremely dangerous could be expected to out-draw every other zoo in the world, combined. No, blame for fictional technology projects gone wrong and inducing a disastrous, if not out-and-out dystopian future gravitates to the PMs. It’s because we own the scope of our projects, particularly so when an outcome is bad, no matter how far removed from the original intent that eventual outcome becomes. Also, it’s interesting that we don’t see any risk managers (no initial caps) around to estimate the odds and impact of the dinosaur-like monsters escaping their containment, and eventually inflicting incalculable (get it?) levels of death and suffering on the world (as depicted in Jurassic World: Dominion [2022]). Before GTIM Nation reminds me of the Ian Malcolm character (played by Jeff Goldblum), I will point out that Malcolm’s character introduces himself as a chaos theoretician, not a risk manager, and quantified none of his predictions (though I will admit finding “life finds a way” as an entry in a risk register would be highly amusing).

To correct the tendency for PMs to receive a preponderance of blame for when some high-falutin’ project goes off the rails, I think the talented writers within GTIM Nation should send proposals to PMI® Publishing for sci-fi novels that feature a dystopian future avoided by a PMP®. Better yet, we should petition PMI® Publishing to commission such a work. Just think what the movie rights would be worth!