People, Planet, Profits & Projects

Many project managers are left-brain thinkers.  We’re analytical.  We’re get-r-done type folk.  Give me the facts, man, and I’ll deliver your project, we say.  Or, if we’re the one presenting the facts, we expect that they’ll deliver action by our project team contributors.

The science of the human brain, however, indicates that as humans, we take many ‘mental shortcuts’.   Our decisions are not always rational.

A recent article in Scientific American has one of the most interesting titles of an article – at least in that esteemed journal: “The Science of Anti-Science Thinking”.   The subtitle also caught my attention: “Convincing people who doubt the validity of climate change and evolution to change their beliefs requires overcoming a set of ingrained cognitive biases”.

The article starts with a porpoise.  Porpoises live in the ocean.  They look like a fish.  Until fairly recently, most people thought they were a fish.  But scientific evidence proved that they are a mammal, and that is now a fact.

When science – or at least technological advancement based on science – yields the automobile, the laser, the smartphone, or a cure for a disease, the advance is welcomed.  But when science tells us something that disturbs the prevailing thought or challenges a societal norm, or, in projects, “that’s not the way we do things around here” – watch out.  The human mind can slip quickly into mental shortcuts and biases.

In the article, which I highly recommend reading, there are some excellent examples and compelling evidence.  But let me focus on the hurdles to accepting facts, since that (accepting facts) is what we need for good project management.

Shortcuts:

The brain is an organ.  Organs use lots of energy and as a living thing, we try to reduce the energy we use – that’s instinct.  On top of this, these days, we’re presented with an overload of information to process.  So we take mental shortcuts – heuristics – rules of thumb – to cut down our processing time.  One example in the article is the “Authority Heuristic”.  In an experiment by psychiatrist Charles Hofling, nurses in a hospital received a phone call from a person identifying himself as a doctor, and directing the on-duty nurse to give their patient a double dose of a drug called Astroten to a patient, even though the label on the bottle boldly limited the dosage, and even though the hospital had a policy requiring handwritten prescriptions for such changes.  95% of the nurses obeyed the unknown “doctor” without raising any questions.  See this link for more detail: https://www.simplypsychology.org/hofling-obedience.html.  Other research in this area comes from Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman and his book “Thinking, Fast and Slow”, summarized well in the video below.  It’s just a few minutes.  Have a look.

These nurses, I think you’d agree, were using “System 1” thinking.

Confirmation Bias:

Even if you have the time to go to System 2 (slower, more disciplined) thinking, there is the chance that we won’t process information impartially.  We will “mix in” our beliefs and give higher priority to the patterns we have seen more often and the ways in which we’ve always thought.

Social Goals:

Now let’s assume you have surpassed the hurdles of shortcuts (System 1 thinking) and confirmation bias, there is still something else that may prevent scientific fact from getting through.  And that is “social pressure”.  Group consensus is a strong thing.  You’ve probably even seen it in your projects.  “Everyone knows that Vendor XYZ is the best in the business”, says the ‘common wisdom’.  Do the facts bear it out?  If you don't think social pressure can make a difference, take a journey back in time and watch this old video from an American TV show called Candid Camera.  It's about something called "The Asch Paradigm".  You'll get a kick out of it.

All three of these hurdles get in the way of conveying real, factual information. 

I bring this up for two reasons – first, to help readers understand why they may be pushing back on research showing that climate change is real and caused by humans, but even if you want to bypass that element, I also bring it up because as project managers need to work based on facts, and that as a PM you will often find yourself in the role of the conveyor of facts and faced with an audience or a functional manager who is taking mental shortcuts or is suffering from confirmation bias.  At a minimum, you need to be aware of how information flows into, around, and back out of the human brain to accomplish your project objectives.

So: think fast, think slow, and consider the facts – including the facts about your own thinking!

No, that's not a typo.

Hidden Figures was a 2016 film which conveys the true story of a team of female African-American mathematicians who played a vital role at NASA during the early years of the U.S. space program, with little recognition, until well after the fact.  This blog post is not about those particular women, but it is about a woman (with a similar surname) who also has been working in planetary science, and from whom, I think we can draw some PM lessons learned.

A recent interview in Scientific American by Jen Schwartz, caught my attention.  This isn’t normally where a project manager would go for information about our discipline of PM, but that doesn’t mean it is not a good source of inspiration and information.  Indeed – it’s a very good source.

The interview is with Christiana Figueres, a career diplomat from Costa Rica.  Recently she orchestrated (you could read that as “project managed”) the 2015 Paris climate agreement, in her role as UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.

Now I realize that some people and organizations have politicized climate change, and even Ms. Figureres herself, but again, I want to point out that I am drawing not from a political journal but one dedicated to credible, reviewed, consensus-based science.

As I often do in this blog, I like to go to the mission statement of an organization to orient myself around the source.  In this case it helps point out how this is a valid source of information.

 Here is Scientific American’s mission statement:

SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN is the world’s leading source and authority for science and technology information for science-interested citizens, delivering understandable, credible and provocative content to an audience of more than 5 million people worldwide. The magazine is independently ranked among the Top 10 US consumer media for “Most Credible” and “Most Objective.”

Founded in 1845 on the commitment to bring first-hand developments in modern

science to our audience, SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN is the oldest continuously

published magazine in the United States. SA boasts over 140 Nobel laureate

authors in our 165 years -- the most of any consumer magazine.

The magazine prides itself on being credible and objective.  And with 165 years of experience, besides making me feel young again, that’s a pretty solid basis.

So – back to Ms. Figueres. After a failed COP15 Climate Conference in Copenhagen in 2010, she spent the next six years rebuilding the global climate change negotiating process based on fairness, transparency and collaboration.  Check the PMBOK® Guide – 5^th Edition, 6^th Edition… any edition, and corroborate that with the PMI Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct – and its values of honesty, responsibility, respect and fairness - and you’ll see that connection.

I’d like to spend a moment highlighting a few extracts from the interview that I’d assert apply to the intersection of PM and sustainability.

I’d like to start with this one from the preamble:

“Figureres achieved unprecedented cooperation not by flexing her authority (the position carries very little)…. Trained as an anthropologist, she bet that humans are motivated to work toward a common goal if given a structure of trust and hopefulness. In the face of high stakes and daunting complexity, she created an even bigger mess, imbued it with optimism, then navigated through it.”

There is a lot to unpack there, starting with what should seem like a familiar refrain for PMs: influencing and motivating without authority.  Next, the bit about creating a mess seems to evoke the concept of Tuckman’s model of Forming, Storming, Norming, and Performing.  She wisely understands the innovation and creation that occurs during “a mess”, so (excuse the kitchen analogy here) while she was “stirring the pot”, she was also making sure that all of the chefs knew the recipe and got along with each other.  Sounds like deliciousness will ensue.  And it did.

In the interview itself, she talks a little about what I read as Agile methodology:

“Looking back, I’ve always had a willingness to be vigilant to where the opportunity is.  You don’t have to progress in a straight line; you can be creative.  Perhaps it’s like a sailing strategy, taking left and right, left and right.  Or sometimes it’s stepping back one foot so you can then step three feet forward.”

And later:

“To all those who suggested that ‘this is too complex, let’s delay six months’, I put my foot down and said, “We are not even considering it”.  You must allow for the process itself to be muddy because that is the space in which innovation occurs, ingenuity sprouts up and surprising alliances come forward.  You want to be not only tolerant but even encouraging of messiness – but with a hard deadline and a clear destination.

Next, and perhaps without knowing it, Ms. Figueres provides expert judgment on Identify Stakeholders and Manage Stakeholder Engagement with this gem:

“From my anthropology background, I drew a conviction that this had to be an inclusive process, not just federal governments.  So we opened it up to the private sector, the spiritual community, and scientists…. There is sort of a self-organizing force that occurs, and better decisions are made when they are informed by as many different perspectives as possible…. Then we allowed for everybody to use the tools they have to apply the science to their particular country, sector, or issue.”

Although this interview was taken from a Scientific American article on the science of gender issues, using Ms. Figueres a platform to discuss “female energy” and to hold her up as an example, I hope you’ll agree that there’s a great deal of value in what she’s said (even in the snippets I’ve included).  And if nothing else, I encourage you to expand your sources of knowledge when it comes to developing yourself and your team – trusted sources that are outside of the usual, but will still boost your capabilities.