PMO Bytes

CIO: “It seems like we’re all set in the right direction. Things look really great.”

IT Manager: “It’s awesome! We’ve never been in such a good shape before.”

Product Manager: “This is going to be the next killer app.”

Business Analyst: “Yeah, it looks really fantastic!”

Project Manager: “Kudos to everyone in this great team.”

…

And this went on and on and in the next few minutes, the room was filled with a cacophony of deafening clapping and laughing sounds. I could have joined in and sung the ‘Kumbaya’ like the rest of the folks. Yet, deep inside me, a voice was ringing. “Are these people crazy?” Unfortunately, the voice was too feeble to be noticed and eventually subsided in the sea of laughter.

Scenarios like this are very common and happen every day in every organization. Whenever the top person says something, the rest will join in the chorus eagerly just like the chicks following the mother hen. Has anyone bothered to do a reality check and challenge the sanity of the optimism? It looks as if people are so afraid to be seen as holding a different view from the leader – the inherent fear of being blacklisted as ‘Negative’. Why is everyone ignoring the elephant in the room? Where is the little boy in “The Emperor’s New Clothes”?

Don’t get me wrong. There is nothing wrong in thinking positively and I am not going into a lengthy debate on optimism versus pessimism with “a glass with water at the halfway point”. However, there is a difference between attitude in thinking and aptitude in judging. The former is about our perception, or worldview, of a situation and the latter is about our ability to assess a situation. Complacency builds and danger looms when the emotional part of attitude overshadows the logical part of aptitude. This is usually the case for those failed projects that are overdose with optimism. It is important to have dreams, but we still have to wake up someday.

Now, if we split aptitude into ‘Weak’ and ‘Strong’ and attitude into ‘Pessimistic’ and ‘Optimistic’ and plot them against one another, we could easily come up with a quadrant similar to the one shown in the diagram below.

Let’s first take a look at the two squares in the lower half of the quadrant. These are the people who are weak in their ability to assess the situation and, therefore, often overrule by their emotional mind. They react to the situation based on what they perceive. Hence, the pessimists will be more negatively inclined and assess the situation in a negative way while the optimists will tend to think more positively. In other words, their aptitude is strongly affected by their attitude. On the other hand, those with stronger ability to judge are in the two squares in the upper half of the quadrant. They are the rational thinkers who are able to balance biased views with better judgments and assessments; not the typical dreamers or naysayers that you would bump into in a day-to-day encounter.

“Your attitude, not your aptitude, determines your altitude.” – Zig Ziglar.

Some of you would likely to argue that attitude is more important than aptitude, so it is imperative to have positive thinking. No doubt this is true, but it is equally essential to maintain a logical mindset. Be skeptical and take all the optimisms with a pinch of salt. Challenge a positive view critically with negative assumptions and see if it survives the test. You won’t get too wrong doing that. In fact, this is the exact approach that we should take when we are managing risks in our projects. Do not be afraid to be labeled as a ‘devil’s advocate’. If positive thinking is the fuel that keeps you going, then negative criticism is the GPS device that helps you stay in the right path and avoid dead ends. The aim is to get to the top right corner of the quadrant – i.e. to be negatively positive.

The world is full of fools.

You can find them in every nook and cranny of the streets. “The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool,” wrote Shakespeare in his famous play “As You Like It”. Well, this literally means that, once in a while, you will find yourself bumping into one of these fools whether you like it or not. Are you able to sift them out from the crowd? How should you deal with them?

I have met enough fools in the projects that I have worked on. As Bertrand Russell once said, “The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.” I share the same sentiment as Russell. This is exactly how fools behave; regardless of whether they are the genuine or the imagined type. Their overconfidence or lack of confidence may turn out to be the latent Achilles’ heel in your projects. The outcome could be catastrophic if it is not being managed well. Unfortunately, they represent one of those top key people issues you have to deal with in project management.

David Dunning and Justin Kruger of Cornell University jointly coined the phenomenon described above as the ‘Dunning-Kruger effect’ - a cognitive bias in which unskilled individuals suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly rating their ability much higher than average. This bias is attributed to a metacognitive inability of the unskilled to recognize their mistakes. In short, this has a similar meaning to the popular quote “he who knows not, and knows not that he knows not, is a fool, shun him”, or the fools are too foolish to know that they are foolish. Dunning and Kruger argued in their paper that – “When people are incompetent in the strategies they adopt to achieve success and satisfaction, they suffer a dual burden: Not only do they reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it.”

How could you differentiate fools from experts when the fools proclaim themselves to be experts while the experts believe that they are fools? As Kruger and Dunning conclude, “the miscalibration of the incompetent stems from an error about the self, whereas the miscalibration of the highly competent stems from an error about others.” Haven’t you come across some smug-faced suppliers who are always boastful about their capabilities but constantly weak in their deliveries? Or a wimpy worrywart in your team that is forever skeptical about what could be accomplished in the project? It is also obvious that Dunning-Kruger effect is applicable to project managers too. Does your project manager have the capability to manage the project in the way that it should be? You probably do not have the answer. The reason is you will need to be very experienced and knowledgeable in project management before you can assess whether your project manager has the capability. Unfortunately, according to Putt’s Law, most people typically do not have good understanding in what they manage.

There are several factors that constitute to the Dunning-Kruger effect. The main argument postulates that fools, due to their incompetency, do not have the necessary skills that are required for self-assessment. In other words, “We’re not very good at knowing what we don’t know,” as Dunning nicely put. On the other hand, flatteries and excessive kudos could be just as bad. Remember the emperor in the tale “The Emperor's New Clothes”? Sometimes, people are being cajoled unknowingly to believe that they are good in something which, in reality, is the exact opposite. I have come across managers that send out standard “Good job, well done!” compliments to the team regardless of the actual performance. All these blindfolded the fools from their incompetency.

So, what can you do to avoid having your project team turning into a ship of fools? Here are a few ideas that you may try:

1. Drop the ‘Mr. Nice’ image and be truthful and sincere in the feedback you give to the team. Do remember that your team will not be able to learn and improve if they cannot differentiate between right and wrong.
2. Empower, motivate and show confidence in your team even if they do not have confidence in themselves. This is extremely crucial in critical times and if you have done it right, you will see the star players in your team shine.
3. Set clear measurable standards and establish a formal review process to actively let the team know how well they have performed. Ensure that there is a balance between positive and negative feedback and, if possible, provide examples to support your points.

I could go on and on rambling about Dunning-Kruger effect and ways to minimize its impact. However, I am not an expert in psychology and definitely not very good at knowing what I don’t know. Hence, I will leave it to the rest of you to chime in with your ideas and thoughts on this topic.

I hardly write follow-up post for my articles. However, a recent article “To Kill A Woodpecker” has generated some interesting comments that prompted me to explore further into the topic of ‘Attention’. Specifically, a comment from Manik Sanadi, Head – Projects PAM ACG Worldwide, has caught my ‘attention’. Manik says “What you need is right mix of when to look from 30K feet and when to look at the ground.” I couldn’t agree more.

Being able to navigate through different levels of information and zoom into a specific level to focus on the desired details provides us a holistic view of what we are managing. Take the experience of driving as an example. We have to keep our focus on the traffic in front of us while constantly checking back on the rear and side mirrors for the surrounding traffic conditions. It is precisely this ability that helps us to keep road accidents at bay.

The same analogy may apply to project management as well. What methods do you use to stay abreast of the deluge of information coming from different levels in your projects? How do you keep an eye on the potential risks at each level and prevent them from turning into real issues? Sometimes, as a project manager, we tend to get too deeply entrenched in a particular area of work and lose track of the bigger picture. Just like driving, we can’t keep focusing on the traffic ahead and forget about the brake pedal. It takes seamless concurrent coordination among the hands, legs, eyes and ears to drive a car. In other words, it means that attention has to be shared and switched continuously from one to another. Now, how do we achieve this in the projects we are managing?

Before we continue, let’s try out a simple visual experiment. Take a look at the image below. Now, focus on the black dot in the center. Keep staring at it and move closer to the image if necessary. After a while, you will notice that the colored fluffs around the black dot start to disappear. Eventually, you will only see a grey square with a black dot in the center. Do not get startled. There isn’t any trick here.

From the above experiment, we can see that attention is a scarce and limited resource. Once you have set your focus on something you will tend to lose track on the others. As William James aptly described in his textbook “Principles of Psychology”:

“Everyone knows what attention is. It is the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought... It implies withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others...”

If this still sounds murky, then probably what we have discussed so far on the various facets of ‘Attention’ could be better explained and represented in the Sohlberg and Mateer hierarchical model. Below are the five hierarchical levels of the model in ascending order.

1. Focused attention: The ability to respond discretely to specific visual, auditory or tactile stimuli.
2. Sustained attention: The ability to maintain a consistent behavioral response during continuous and repetitive activity.
3. Selective attention: The ability to maintain a behavioral or cognitive set in the face of distracting or competing stimuli. Therefore it incorporates the notion of “freedom from distractibility.”
4. Alternating attention: The ability of mental flexibility that allows individuals to shift their focus of attention and move between tasks having different cognitive requirements.
5. Divided attention: This is the highest level of attention and it refers to the ability to respond simultaneously to multiple tasks or multiple task demands.

Although this model was originally developed for clinical use, it has since been widely adopted in evaluating a person’s ability to pay attention. As we have seen from the above, attention is multi-faceted. Thus, it follows logically that the methods we employ to address attention-related problems should also be manifold and adaptable to the actual needs. This is definitely a good starting point for us to explore what we could do to help project managers stay focused in their projects.

Congratulations! You have reached the end of the article. Thank you for paying attention without switching.

I attended a talk conducted by an IT leader recently. He is a funny guy. I would describe him as a witty old veteran with a bagful of stories up his sleeve. Hearing him speak was like enjoying a folktale told by an old wise man in the corner of an old Irish pub. He basically treated the audience with a feast of unusual juicy stories that were both entertaining and enlightening. One of those stories resonated with a thought that I have been struggling with lately and sparked a series of frenzy ideas that had kept me busy musing for the rest of the day. What he had actually shared with us was an uncommon method to kill a woodpecker.

What? Killing a flicker?

Don’t get me wrong. Before you start calling up the American Bird Conservancy (ABC), I would like to assure you that I am not an ornithophobe. According to the IT leader, the easiest way to kill a woodpecker is to use an air horn. Those who have watched a woodpecker drumming and hammering a tree would agree that it takes a lot of concentration to achieve the precise, rapid and repeated blows. The sound from the air horn seems to be able to distract the woodpecker causing it to land its bill in an improper position thereby breaking its neck. Now you get it. As you can see, it is very important for us to stay focused on the things we do. Everybody knows the danger of talking over the phone while driving. We love multitasking. However, losing focus could be fatal sometimes.

“Project management is like juggling three balls – time, cost and quality. Program management is like a troupe of circus performers standing in a circle, each juggling-three balls and swapping balls from time to time.” G. Reiss once said.

As a project manager, quite often we have to manage several projects at the same time just like the juggler in the circus. Like it or not, this is how we should be making full use of our time efficiently. However, if we are not careful, we may lose our focus and end up with a broken neck like the woodpecker. So, should we just stick to only one project at all times so that we can keep the focus level high? Unfortunately, this is realistically not possible; we all know that.

First of all, people get bored easily and when that happens, they lose their focus. We are well-aware that boredom is one of the main causes for most long-haul truck accidents. Psychological scientist John Eastwood of York University (Ontario, Canada) and colleagues at the University of Guelph and the University of Waterloo define boredom as “an aversive state of wanting, but being unable, to engage in satisfying activity,” which arises from failures in one of the brain’s attention networks. In other words, monotony breeds boredom. The irony is that the more we try to focus on just one project alone, the more likely we will lose our focus due to monotony. It seems like rotating from one project to another occasionally might not be a bad idea after all.

Although staying focused helps us to block off unwanted noises and distractions, there is an undesirable consequence to it. Focused attention makes us oblivious to things happening in the environment around us. For example, most of us should be familiar with this experience where we are so engrossed in the book in hands, totally unaware of someone entering the room, until the person suddenly stands in front of us and gives us a shock. Everyday experiences like this are examples that show that when we are focused, we tend to miss out something that might otherwise be glaringly obvious. Psychologists Daniel J. Simons and Christopher F. Chabris have further demonstrated this in the famous “Invisible Gorilla” experiment to study a psychological phenomenon that they called ‘Change Blindness’. Likewise, once we get too focused on and absorbed by a single project, we may miss out important details and warning signs from other projects.

Now, here is the real dilemma. We have learned that Woody needs full undisturbed concentration to do his wood-pecking work. However, by doing so, he loses vigilance on the environment surrounding him. Woody will not be aware of any imminent danger or threat. Had Woody been alert enough to spot the air horn, he would have paused for a while and avoided the fate of a broken neck. To focus, or not to focus, that is the question.

There is an interesting duologue between Humpty Dumpty and Alice in Lewis Carroll’s “Through the Looking-Glass” that goes something like this.

“I don't know what you mean by ‘glory,’ ” Alice said.

Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. “Of course you don’t—till I tell you. I meant ‘there’s a nice knock-down argument for you!’ ”

“But ‘glory’ doesn’t mean ‘a nice knock-down argument’,” Alice objected.

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”

“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”

“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that’s all.”

Alice was too much puzzled to say anything, so after a minute Humpty Dumpty began again. “They’ve a temper, some of them—particularly verbs, they’re the proudest—adjectives you can do anything with, but not verbs—however, I can manage the whole lot! Impenetrability! That's what I say!”

If you start to talk like Humpty Dumpty in your projects, then you are in for some serious troubles. Every domain or community has its own nomenclature that people follow in communication. This can be a set of loosely defined names or terms that people use in daily conversations or a set of well-defined terminologies that the academics or professionals use in their typical channels of communication. The main objective for people within the same community to speak the common tongue is to avoid any unnecessary confusion in the communication.

Imagine in a class of twenty students, if I ask each of them to draw a ‘mouse’, I am pretty sure that I will receive twenty different versions of mice each in its own shape and size. In fact, I won’t be surprised that some would even draw me a picture of ‘Mickey’ or a computer mouse depending on what is in their minds at that moment. Now, instead of asking the students to draw their own imaginary mouse, let’s say I get them to draw a toy mouse that I have placed in front of the class. I am quite sure this time round I will receive twenty copies of identical illustrations of the same toy mouse with slight variations depending on the drawing skill of individual student. Comparing this with the previous scenario, it is obvious that this can only be achieved if the class has a common public reference point. Wittgenstein had illustrated a similar argument in his famous thought experiment – ‘Beetle in a box’ – stating that “It does not matter that one cannot experience another’s subjective sensations. Unless talk of such subjective experience is learned through public experience the actual content is irrelevant; all we can discuss is what is available in our public language.”

Don’t give up yet. There are things that you can do to avoid such language confusions in your projects. Here are some guidelines on how you could avoid being like Humpty Dumpty.

1. Use visuals: A picture beats a thousand words. Communicate more clearly with drawings as Dan Roam purported. Don’t underestimate your drawing skill. You don’t need to be Picasso to be able to express your thoughts visually with simple sketches (ironically, not many people can understand Picasso’s drawings). Grab a pen and a scrap of paper and walk your stakeholders through some complex concepts you have in your mind instead of just talking so that they can visualize your ideas.
2. Avoid jargon: Avoid jargon and acronyms by all means. It is not very cool to try to impress your stakeholders on how much you know by showering them with floods of jargon and acronyms. A sentence like “We will discuss the ACWP, BCWP and BCWS and review the CPI and SPI of the EVA report during the weekly CCB meeting.” definitely sounds intimidating to some. If you genuinely need to use jargon and acronyms, make sure you give a brief description before using them.
3. Add a glossary: It is not uncommon that your stakeholders may interpret certain words differently from you. A word like ‘float’ could be understood by them as something to sustain a person in water. Keep a glossary of commonly used terms in your projects. Share it with your stakeholders or attach it as an appendix in your project plans. Glossary helps to establish a common platform for communication between you and your stakeholders. There are a few good glossaries of project management terms published, for example the ones from Wikipedia and PMI, which you may use as a basic reference to build your own glossary.
4. Clarify, clarify and clarify: Leave no room for ambiguity. If you realize that your stakeholders are staring at you blankly or they have been extremely quiet for the past ten minutes, you know that you have lost them. Pause for a while and ask them if they have any question. Better still, randomly invite one of them to summarize what you have just said and check if anyone has any comment. Do the same whenever you are covering some complex topics.
5. Quantify, not just clarify: Sometimes words like ‘critical’ and ‘important’ can be rather subjective and mean different things to different people. Specifically, how critical is ‘critical’ to you? Is ‘important’ more important than ‘critical’ or ‘critical’ more critical than ‘important’? Drop the guessing game. Instead of saying ‘a large group of people’, try quantifying it if possible and say ‘a group of fifty people’.