The Money Files

What has quietly become harder since last year?

What assumptions are we still working from?

• We’ll have business support and stakeholder engagement
• The team will be available
• Funding will be made available.

Who is more (or less) influential now?

What’s draining effort without adding value?

What decision are we postponing?

I’ve been thinking recently about the role of intuition in project management. We often rely on the data, processes and logical structure of project management, but if you’re anything like me, you’ve probably spent more than one afternoon feeling that something just isn’t quite right and wondering how you can define the problem when you just can’t put your finger on it.

It’s a sense that something’s off. Maybe a project is veering off track, or a team member isn’t quite clicking with the rest of the group, but there’s nothing tangible to fully explain why. Maybe a stakeholder seems hesitant to commit, or you sense the team’s morale is low, even if the status reporting is telling you everything is on track. These things might not be much today, but they might cause bigger problems in the future.

That’s where intuition often comes into play. It’s often said that project management is part art and part science, and the intuition part is definitely not science! But the art is where we navigate the complex, human part of the job.

Managing uncertainty

So much of what we do as project managers is working in an uncertain environment. It’s juggling all the facts and then applying what feels right, while sticking to the boundaries and governance structure – just writing that out makes me feel it’s a balancing act. And one we don’t always get right!

A lot of what we do as project managers is solving problems, or helping teams solve problems, and the kinds of problems my teams are faced with today feel stickier and more intertwined than the projects of 10 years ago. No matter how careful the planning, there are unforeseen challenges. And that’s where intuition steps in. It helps connect the dots between facts, previous experience and what we know will work, which is handy if you don’t have lots of time to solutionise.

Experience shapes intuition

How much do gut feelings play when you are faced with an uncertain situation? And how much are those gut feelings influenced by the years of experience and knowledge of corporate strategy and conversations with your sponsor? Probably more than we acknowledge.

We must internalise all the things to do with project context, plus all our lessons learned experience on the way, and so while it feels like we’re making a decision based on gut feeling or intuition, isn’t it really a decision shaped by professional practice and experience? (Or is that the same thing?)

Experience feeds our intuition and guides us when the situation is high-pressure or the decision is woolly. The more experience you have, the better your instincts tend to be – and not just in project management but across all facets of life generally. It’s a deep understanding of your environment and how people and processes play together. You’ve seen it happen before, either on your own project or someone else’s, or you’ve read about it or heard a conference presentation. All these things contribute to your ability to act instinctively. They inform your decision-making, creating a kind of ‘mental database’ that helps you respond more quickly and effectively when things don’t go as planned. Which is quite often, on projects!

Let process lead

We can’t manage everything on feelings, the project management process is there for a reason. However, we can’t help but manage a little bit on instinct and experience as well. The more experience you have, the easier it is to trust your gut. But as we say at work, trust but verify. Once you’ve got a sense of where you feel you should be going, check in with that reluctant stakeholder, or ask the team about how they are feeling. Get tangible data where you can to back up what you instinctively know, and go from there.

Psychological safety, as I think of it, is the way that you show up at work and how much risk you feel yourself in when expressing your opinions or when choosing a course of action.

If it feels ‘safe’ you’ll speak up when things are wrong, suggest new ideas and call out bad behaviour. If it doesn’t feel safe, you’ll keep your head down.

On a project team, psychological safety is important because you want people to challenge poor ideas or speak up when they see a better way of doing things. And also because we are nice leaders and we want people to be happy at work, without second-guessing what their boss is going to think all the time.

In an environment where psychological safety is present, people feel that it is safe to take risks. They might try a new solution or propose a new way of working. They might come up with an idea and implement it, or opt for a new technology over a proven one because it might be better.

They also feel that it is safe to speak up and express ideas. They’ll speak in meetings, bounce ideas around, build on other people’s ideas and say when they don’t think an idea will work.

The benefits are clear.

You will see better team collaboration. People will be more creative and prepared to innovate. You should end up with better problem-solving and decision-making. And it will feel like a nice place to work surrounded by professional adults.

How do you know if you’ve got psychological safety in the team?

It’s probably easier to look at what the environment looks like if you don’t have psychological safety.

You’ll see:

• Lack of participation in meetings.
• Fear of retribution
• Fear of embarrassment.

People might not say out loud: I was too embarrassed to say what I thought, but you might pick up on it either through one-to-one conversations or body language.

If you want to find out more, you could survey the team or use other feedback methods, but if the environment doesn’t feel like one where you can speak freely, frankly I don’t think you’ll get a lot of good out of those methods. It is probably best to build good relationships with some of the people who exhibit more confidence or who contribute the most and talk to them openly about your worries for the team.

The trouble with projects is that they happen inside the culture of the organisation, so while you might want to create an environment where people feel safe, if the rest of the organisation isn’t backing you up, that can be tricky.

How to create a safer environment

In your leadership role, you can model vulnerability and openness. Share what you’re comfortable sharing. Lead by example. Be consistent in your actions and expectations and demonstrate the behaviours you want to see.

Encourage and reward contributions. Let people know you appreciate their ideas even if you don’t end up using them.

Value diverse perspectives. Ask for them, incorporate them and let people know that their voices are being heard. Again, if they share their perspective and you can’t do anything with it or affect any change, at least pass that back to them.

A lot of what you can do centres on establishing norms for respectful communication. For example, regularly ask for feedback, through anonymous suggestion methods if necessary (and people are wary of Microsoft forms not being truly anonymous). Handle conflict early when you spot it, and look out for those people who are showing signs of being resistant to change and support them.

Schedule some team-building activities, but not awkward cringey ones, things that the team actually will be interested in doing.

Over time, hopefully you’ll see that the feeling in the team has changed. I think it’s a hard thing to measure, but you might see results through employee surveys, perhaps in responses to do with belonging, or feeling understood/appreciated etc.

What’s more evident is that you’ll probably feel it. You can observe the team dynamics and notice what is different. However, you don’t want to lose that and slip back into old ways, so keep psychological safety on the agenda. Ask people how they feel about working in the team now, and what else you could do together to encourage good working practices. Then act on their suggestions.