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Date
In a recent post, I discussed breaking the bonds of bureaucracy – with lots of the thought leadership coming from Yuval Harari’s Nexus. I continue to be fascinated with this book, and wanted to share one more insight that will be helpful to you as a project leader.
This one deals with self-correcting systems. Harari talks about it mainly in the context of large organizations, especially governments. Although he is not shy about covering its flaws, he talks about the American government system established by the Founding Fathers, which has three independent parts – all given significant power – Congress, the Executive Branch, and the Judicial Branch, calling it the closest thing to perfection so far in history, in terms of self-correcting governmental systems. He has some strong words of warning about how that is in grave danger in the US as the Executive Branch swells with power at the cost of the other two, as well as entities such as Universities and the media. I will stay away from politics, but since it’s such a good example of how a self-correcting system CAN and SHOULD work, it needs to be brought up for context.
Harari has an entire chapter called Errors: The Fantasy of Infallibility. As project leaders we know if we are too overconfident in estimation and in identifying (or probably more likely FAILING to identify) risk, we will have project ‘errors’ like not accounting for high-impact/high probability risks. How do we keep our egos in check, and avoid the ‘fantasy of infallability’? With systems of checks and balances. With an environment in which it’s okay to raise a potential threat. Applying an agile mindset that gives us permission to try something new early on. All of these things help.
Harari’s insight is deep – he goes into the complexity of self-correcting system and how it’s actually important to make the system complex and interrelated. In fact, he says that one of the things that help dictators and authoritarian governments succeed is simplicity and ease of action by an Executive branch that can use simple, quick orders to get things done (without all of the inconvenience of potential checks and balances).
I am not suggesting that projects need to become complex for the sake of complexity. Instead, my suggestion is that decision making needs feedback loops, good, solid, facts from which to work, and, as the diagram shows, some mechanisms to check and balance the decisions. See my other post from today about Seattle’s plumbing for examples of where this was not done – and they ended up with sewage geysers, centuries later, toilets which cost US$1M each which were sold for $1200 later due to missed threat identification and unchecked decisions.
I’d like to quote from another blogger, Jared Mabry who posted on LinkedIn recently, also inspired by this part of Harari’s Nexus:
He opens by defining a self-corrective system, and he uses a thermostat as an example – not a bad idea. But we can stick with toilets. They fill up with water until they sense that the fill-up of their tank is juuuust right, then they (hopefully) shut off the flow itself. It’s a self-correcting system. It’s just that the humans who use them are not necessarily so self-correcting!
He goes on to talk about some of the techniques and the necessary environment to have self-correcting systems in projects and that’s what inspired me (not AI!) to create the diagram below which I hope you find helpful.
What sorts of self-correcting systems do you have in your projects? In your PMO? I am interested to hear about them, please do respond in the comments.
Referenced Linked in post by Jared Mabry
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/self-correcting-organization-key-thriving-uncertainty-jared-mabry-hqvye/
Posted
by
Richard Maltzman
on: July 31, 2025 12:03 PM |
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