The Contagion Of Ignorance

 

This is going to be a tricky blog to write, so let me make one distinction up front: when I use the word “ignorant,” I’m specifically referring to Merriam-Webster’s second definition, “Unaware, Uninformed.”[i] Other definitions tend to include an aspect of a lack of intelligence, or some other form of mental inadequacy, and, for the purposes of this blog, that’s not what I’m talking about. Now, we are all probably familiar with how learning can be contagious, particularly as a member of a high-performing team. In medicine, there’s even an axiom for disseminating proper technique, “See it, do it, teach it.” It’s why, in organizations that value quality and performance, the more mature PMOs will tend to act as a macro-organizational enhancement, steadily increasing the odds that the projects in the portfolio will come in on-time, on-budget.

But the dark side of organization-wide learning is the very real possibility that the cumulative learned skills of the Project Team or PMO could unravel, leaving it weaker than it had been previously. This effect is more likely to come about under two circumstances:

• For Management and Operations (M&O) contractors at facilities attempting to deal with a long-standing PM problem, bringing in managers – particularly high-level ones – from other, similar facilities can be iffy, especially in destinations that perform a unique function. The reason is because people new to the hiring facility will likely not be familiar with many of the nuanced barriers to template-derived management strategies or technical approaches. The new executive may have been extremely effective in correcting a similar problem at another place and time, but the hard fact in many of these instances is that the barrier that can render this carried solution completely ineffective is both subtle and undefeated. New managers and executives hired from the outside, in my experience, will place a high value on loyalty within their new organization, not necessarily talent, meaning that the very members of the Project Team who are best able to assist in offering up course corrections are also the ones who will likely be seen as opposing the new manager, thereby eroding their organizational standing. It also means that the really-not-that-analogous solution being bolted on to the current problems will drive out better options by force of leveraging organizational power, reducing or even eliminating the chances of negotiating those very nuanced yet undefeated barriers.
• Then we have the situations where the manager(s) determining the technical approach did not attain their position through merit. Very few true meritocracies exist. The only one I’m aware of is United States Chess, where your ranking in that organization is your current points accumulated. Your score is what it is, and it alone determines your rank in USC. So, given that in the business world, the people in positions to make the final determination as to technical approach and implementation strategy didn’t necessarily attain those positions through merit, it stands to reason that some of those determinations will be flawed, perhaps irretrievably so. Hatfield’s Rule of Management #24 (a) clearly states that the first of the three critical characteristics of managerial leadership is the ability to identify the optimal, or at least workable, technical solution(s) to the problems being addressed by the Team. However, those who have attained positions of managerial leadership deficient in this ability, sometimes by even the smallest degree, will not only tend to default towards more familiar template-based solutions, I have seen them actively seek to defeat a better technical approach should it be offered up by any other Team member. Consider what this effect will have in the aggregate: the person pushing the sub-optimal, template technical strategy/implementation approach is overcoming the person advocating for the superior, if not truly optimal approach.

In each of these scenarios, ignorance is advancing at the expense of the macro-organization’s ability to effectively handle novel or difficult managerial problems. Essentially, ignorance has become contagious, and is working against the organization’s ability to make informed decisions on a consistent basis. And the sure-fire indicator that the ignorance-contagion effect is unfolding in your organization? It’s when the new/not meritorious exec finally comes to the realization that their techniques have failed, and places the blame directly on the insouciance of the Project Team in carrying out their flawed management strategies. This “explanation” almost always carries with it the assertion that their strategy would have been successful, if only upper management would have provided sufficient support, or backing (i.e., threatened to fire those members of the Project Team who failed to miraculously make the flawed approach actually work).

But here’s the thing: those “insouciant” Project Team members taking the blame for the failure were most likely the most educated ones, recognizing that the technical approach being pushed by the PM was flawed. As the stigma of failure gloms on to the educated, and insulates the unskilled PM from that failure, ignorance advances, and the managerial effectiveness of the macro-organization retreats, rendering ignorance very contagious indeed.

[i] Retrieved from https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/ignorant on March 26, 2023, 15:26 MDT.