Managing Projects At Lake Wobegon

 

The “Lake Wobegon Effect” is the common term for the phenomena of illusory superiority. According to exploringyourmind.com,

The Lake Wobegon Effect is believing that we are superior to others and being oblivious of our weaknesses and errors. We have a false sense of superiority, whether it’s in intelligence, beauty or behavior.[i]

Lake Wobegon, of course, is the fictitious setting for much of author Garrison Keillor’s work, and is a place where “all women are strong, all men are good looking and all children are above average.” The effects of illusory superiority are surprisingly common. For example, 80% of Americans and 77% of Swedes believe themselves to be better-than-average drivers.[ii] Now comes the question that seasoned GTIM Nation members probably already know is on my mind:

What does everyone reading this blog believe would be the result of the poll question put to self-identifying PMs, “Do you believe yourself to be below average, average, or above average Project Manager?” Of course we’re experts, dang it! I still cringe when I recall an instance where, in a major project review meeting, one of the customer’s “experts” described a clearly incorrect method for collecting Earned Value data, and was called on it. “Do you know PMI®?” she demanded. “I’m a PMP®!” she exclaimed, as if that was supposed to suddenly add legitimacy to her clearly invalid assertion.

An added aspect of illusory superiority is that genuinely advanced people tend to have an appreciation of what they don’t know, leading the way to some level of self-awareness that can serve as a brake on the Lake Wobegon Effect. The implication here, of course, is that it’s the less-advanced people who are more likely to exhibit illusory superiority, meaning that…

Meanwhile, Back In The Project Management World…

…in those instances where, say, some policy or procedure document is being developed for PM application within the macro-organization, it’s at least somewhat likely that the people who are presenting their ideas most aggressively may very well be the very people whose ideas should be filtered out of such documents.

I recall the time I spent working on the Practice Standard for Earned Value Management for PMI®. At a meeting held back in Pennsylvania, where we were being instructed by subject matter experts in the legal and practical matters associated with generating this practice standard, one of the presentations was from a person from the American National Standards Institute, or ANSI. One of the take-aways from this fellow’s presentation was that the content of our practice standard should seek to be such that no one considered an expert in the field should object to its presence in the document. I remember holding up my hand and, after being recognized, asked “We’re talking about the community of Project Management specialists, here. You could get fifty of them into a room, and they would not agree on the color of an orange. How on Earth are we going to get that level of consensus across the much larger expert-in-Earned-Value population?” The presenter had no direct answer. If I recall correctly, he basically reiterated his original assertion. I just shook my head, suddenly less enthusiastic about the task in front of the Team. Now add to all this the Lake Wobegon Effect, and we have the threat of the advancement of legitimate Project Management science being commandeered by the people who are most likely to present themselves as advanced in PM scholarship or experience, but lack the kind of in-depth understanding needed to document valid insights.

The Lake Wobegon Effect may also go a long way towards explaining why management fads tend to get the traction that they do prior to being either openly exposed and discarded, or dying long, drawn-out deaths as organizations gradually abandon them. I would absolutely love for the former of these two fates to be the one that finally takes down risk management (no initial caps), but my sense is that it will eventually die on-the-vine, like Six Sigma is doing. For those in management in the 1990s, Six Sigma was all the rage, so much so that not having a Team or Group dedicated to its proliferation was considered by the “experts” to be very poor form, indeed. As the craze hit fever pitch near the turn of the millennium, more and more organizations with legitimate management acumen began to realize that its adoption did not directly lead to a competitive advantage, which raises the question: did those exerts and consultants who insisted on implementing a Six Sigma program suffer from illusory superiority? And, if so, what’s to stop their modern-day counterparts from initiating another, similar fad within the PM universe?

The only remedy that I can think of is for we PM-types to keep in mind that Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon doesn’t actually exist. If we find ourselves in a place or organization where everyone is an expert in PM, there’s a distinct possibility that its output is little more than compelling fiction.

[i] Retrieved from https://exploringyourmind.com/the-lake-wobegon-effect-above-average/ on May 6, 2023, 13;16 MDT.

[ii] https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ARE-WE-ALL-LESS-RISKY-AND-MORE-SKILLFUL-THAN-OUR-Svenson/ad37e00352406dd776bc010769489b2412951c7d?p2df.