Game Theory in Management

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.

“I have one simple request, and that is to have sharks with frickin’ laser beams attached to their heads.”  --Dr. Evil, Austin Powers, International Man of Mystery, 1997.

The comic villain from the Austin Powers movies, Dr. Evil (brilliantly played by Mike Meyers), heads a massive organization set on (a) destroying the Earth with purloined nuclear weapons, (b) destroying the Earth with a moon-based laser beam, and/or (c) using a tractor beam to pull a meteor into the Earth, presumably resulting in its destruction. Fortunately, the world is spared these terrible fates by secret agent Austin Powers (also played by Mike Meyers), but not before these various, ahem, projects are well past their planning stages and have begun implementation.

Now, the reason Dr. Evil is desirous that his pet/guard sharks have lasers attached to their heads bears some scrutiny. The stated purpose is that he “…figure(s) every creature deserves a warm meal.”[i] This reason is, of course, comedy gold, since it provides an extremely silly purpose on top of a clearly unreasonable request.

Meanwhile, Back In The Project Management World…

I’ve endured several instances of highly-placed executives making, umm, unfortunate Management Information System (MIS) requests of me in my career, but two in particular stand out in my memory as being illustrative of what can happen in PM space when people with a limited knowledge of Project Management principles are put in charge. The first of these involved a PM who was very interested that I, his project controls specialist, create for him a “swim lane chart.” With a little prodding I discovered that this “swim lane chart” was actually a PERT chart, sorted in rows by performing organization.

“Sure, we can do that. We’ll need to start with a Work Breakdown Structure, then develop the project’s Organizational Breakdown Structure, which will allow us to create the Responsibility/Accountability Matrix…”

“I don’t want any of that. I just want a swim lane chart.”

“I understand, but the boxes in the PERT … I mean, “swim lane chart,” represent Work Packages, and to create them, we’ll need a WBS…”

“Look, I’m telling you I don’t want any of that! I just want a swim lane chart!”

Seeing him get more agitated and insistent led me to believe that I was making no progress, so I demurred and told him I would get right on it, and headed back to my office. While I was en route this guy called my line manager, and had me kicked off the project.

The second was similar. An executive was brought in from a place that was really not very analogous to his new situation. After a few weeks I received the out-of-the-blue assignment to help him acquire and implement a specific computer application that was billed as an “action item tracker.” My first meeting was with this exec and the software’s marketing team, who had obviously already sold the exec on its “benefits.” The meeting started with just me and the exec in the conference room, with the marketers on video.

“What role is being envisioned for this app?” I asked.

“It’s an action item tracker!” came the exec’s reply, already somewhat agitated.

“Okay, but (this organization) already has an institutional action item tracker. Will this application do something that the institutional one doesn’t?”

The frantic looks between the marketers and the exec quickly and clearly informed me that no one had even thought to look at the existing systems for duplicate (or even compatible) functionality.

“This one is just for (a specific set of) projects. Also, I want it to relay performance information.”

“You mean like Critical Path analysis? Do you want it to perform a forward/backward pass by itself, or should it take in data from (the existing CPM software)?”

Again, it became immediately clear that no one had even thought about duplicate or compatible functionality.

“The app doesn’t have a utility that will accept data from (our CPM software)” the software marketing guys offered.

“Can it perform Critical Path calculations itself?”

“No.”

The exec called an early end to the meeting. After I left, he contacted my line manager, and had me removed from the project.

Now, since this calling of the line manager and having me removed business has an Austin Powers analogy to Dr. Evil pushing a button on a console and having the occupant of a specific conference room chair ejected into a fiery pit, I think I can safely assert a couple of take-aways. The first is that most (if not all) PM-types will encounter, at some point in their careers, an exec who doesn’t understand the basics of Project Management nor Management Information System architecture, but is nonetheless in a position of making key decisions in those arenas. The second is that these people will intensely resent anyone who points out the deficiencies in their ill-conceived initiatives.

So, how do you attach a laser to a shark’s head? You don’t. If asked, you get out of the conference room before your chair ejects you into a fiery pit.

[i] Retrieved from https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Austin_Powers:_International_Man_of_Mystery on April 26, 2023, 20:43 MDT.

Within the Marvel Comics Universe (MCU) there are a wide variety of villains, but then, there would have to be, right? I mean, if you are to introduce a character with super-human abilities, it would be rather disappointing if that character were to, say, use their amazing powers to ensure people used the correct recycling bins. No, the antagonists in these stories must have the following characteristics:

• Unmistakable evil intent,
• …impacting either (a) a few loved ones, or (b) millions of randos (or both), and
• Some advanced capability that renders them invulnerable to nominal law enforcement, i.e., they have a super power too.

Now, some of these villains, while having an advanced capability, aren’t really impervious to traditional law enforcement techniques. “Doctor Octopus,” a.k.a. Dr. Octavius from Spider Man II (2004) has infused onto his spine four robotic arms, alternately directed by him and by an artificial intelligence mechanism that’s part of the arms. While there’s no question that these arms make Dr. Octavius formidable, they don’t make him, well, bullet-proof, and hand guns are pretty much the universal weapon of American constabulary. Nevertheless, it falls to Spider Man himself to thwart the Doctor’s reckless plans. At the other end of the spectrum is “Thanos,” from The Avengers: Infinity War (2018), who, with a single act (“The Blip”), wipes out at random half of all living things in the universe[i] (not the galaxy, mind you, but the universe. As a point of reference, NASA’s 2016 estimate of the number of galaxies in the observable universe is 200 billion[ii]). How could one describe such a villain? As a super, super, super villain? An omni villain?

Meanwhile, Back In The Project Management World…

While the typical new PMP® certification holder is not given to changing wardrobe in order to include skin-tight, brightly-colored costumes, there is a subtle but clear mandate to oppose – extremely powerful criminals? No, shoddy management practices, no matter how deeply entrenched in your organization, nor how widely-accepted they are in the business world. As GTIM Nation is well aware, some of my favorite Super Management Villains (SMVs) include:

• The notion that the point of all management is to “maximize shareholder wealth,”
• The overuse of Return on Investment,
• risk management (no initial caps),
• The idea that PMs should “engage all stakeholders,”
• The “bottoms-up” Estimate at Completion,

…among others. But today I want to make the case for distinguishing between actual Project performance, and the Management Information Systems (MISs) that measure Project performance, and why this distinction matters in the realm of combatting PM supervillains.

Let’s step back, and take the 35,000 foot view of Project Management. From this perspective, what’s the point of PM? If you said “to help ensure that projects are brought in on-time, on-budget,” go to the head of the class. How does PM writ large accomplish this? By showing how to set up the Management Information Systems that allow actual Project Managers to know where to devote their limited time and energy, towards problems that represent barriers to accomplishing the scope on-time, on-budget, and away from those areas of project execution that are going just fine without the additional attention. I want to reiterate this distinction, because it’s important: the PMI®s, ProjectManagement.coms, and all PM-oriented academe do not exist to make decisions for the PM; rather, they exist to help the actual PM know what they need to make better, if not absolutely optimal decisions.

So here’s how we can start identifying our SMVs. Know that the ones who are interfering with the nominal PM’s decisions, while certainly villains, are not the super variety we’re after. This is Dr. Octopus-level management villainy. Lack of managerial latitude in executing decisions is an organizational behavior and performance issue. What will lead to the switching on of the ProjectManagement.com searchlight/signal (actually, that’s an awful lot to put on a spotlight/projector. Let’s stick with PMI®) is going to be those pseudo-management techniques and practices that not only fail to inform our nominal PM person, but will actually consume time, energy, and resources to deliver irrelevant, or even misleading information streams, increasing the odds of poor decisions being made, and steering the so-afflicted projects towards delays and overruns. To the extent that these poorly-formulated techniques generating marginally useful information streams become entrenched and commonly accepted within the macro PM community, they become more and more difficult to overturn. Worse, should they become so identified with the nominal PMO that typical executives are no longer able to differentiate between valid and invalid PM techniques and practices, we’re looking at a scale of management knavery that could have a profound negative impact on …, well, not the universe. I’ll confine my alarmism to the arena of management science.

What’s to stop all this from happening? That depends. Your butler just came into your study, and has called your attention to the PMI® signal (with or without the “®”) high above the city’s skyscrapers. What are you going to do now?

[i] Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blip on April 17, 2023, 21:20 MDT.

[ii] Retrieved from https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2016/hubble-reveals-observable-universe-contains-10-times-more-galaxies-than-previously-thought on April 16, 2023, 1500 MDT.

Whenever I see an article that asserts the need for Project Management Offices to emphasize “adding value,” I think such statements beg the question, “value” as determined by whom? What is the nominal value generated by the typical PMO? Before I delve into what this PMO-generated “value” is, let’s take a look at what it is not. Almost all of the hits I saw when searching “What does a Project Management Office do?” included the following:

• A governance function.
• Training.
• Establishing “best practices.”
• While many of the hits described the overall soft boundary layers of definition between “project,” “program,” and “portfolio” management offices, they usually indicated some sort of “coordination” function.
• I saw a lot of mentions of changing or improving corporate culture to be more accepting of PM.
• They were also very keen on the PMO performing resource allocation.

It probably won’t surprise GTIM Nation that I find all of this to be fairly objectionable. But before I can demonstrate why all of this is not only mistaken, but may actually be harming the advancement of Project Management writ large, let me remind everyone of Hatfield’s Incontrovertible Rule of Management #3:

The 80^th percentile best managers who have access to only 20% of the information needed to obviate a given decision will be consistently out-performed by the 20^th percentile worst managers who have access to 80% of the information so needed.

Keep in mind that, when we’re discussing the kind of information streams needed by Project Managers in general, this information is distinct from what’s needed by Asset Managers, or even Strategic Managers. The source and residence of the data Asset Managers need is the general ledger, and the techniques they use consume data from that source (e.g., the grossly overused and imprecise Return on Investment). Similarly, since Strategic Managers’ proper focus is on market share, the information streams they rely on allow them to compute the value of that parameter, and evaluate the various strategies that can be used to improve it.

Not so the PMs. While the Scope Baseline is certainly integral to all other derived information within this realm, it’s the Cost and Schedule Baselines, set up to allow Earned Value and Critical Path Methodologies to function, that create the main source of the needed project insights. The implication here is that, all other things being equal, the primary purpose of the PMO is to put into the hands of the decision makers the information they need to make the best management decisions for their projects. It’s based on this definition of the value that PMOs bring to the table that I reject the previous list of what they do, to wit:

• Governance? Please. Consider a scenario where we have two PMs, “A” and “B.” PM-A takes on new technology-based projects, and consistently brings them in on-time, on-budget. However, she pretty much ignores the PMO’s prohibitions on start-to-start relationships among the activities in her schedule baseline, and doesn’t do risk management at all. PM-B works fairly basic, familiar projects, but is consistently late and over budget. He also follows the PMO’s guidance to the letter. Whom among them, do you think, would be more worried should the organization face a sudden and dramatic downturn in contract backlog?
• Training is a line management function, not a Project Management function.
• What represents a “best practice” is highly subjective. Don’t believe me? Look at all the overhead (or even Project!) budget wasted on the risk managers (no initial caps).
• The “coordination” of the projects within the Program or Portfolio, when done properly, will take into account the kinds of work the macro-organization does best, what the competition in that arena looks like, the nature of the current and anticipated proposal backlog, among others that all fall squarely into the realm of Strategic Management. And those managers can’t do their jobs properly if they don’t have access to the kinds of cost and schedule performance measurement systems that can inform them of the macro-organization’s strengths and weaknesses, again pointing to the need for the PMO to provide PM-centric information streams.
• I’ve already done a recent blog on the futility of attempting to directly change corporate culture.
• Resource allocation is another line management function. The PMs, of course, must specify their needs, but it’s up to the non-PM-centric parts of the organization to recruit, retain, or train the personnel to fill those needs.

Note that each of these functions that these sources contend are supposed to be part of the PMO consume time, energy, and budget. If what I’m pointing out is accurate (which, of course, it is), then all of that time, energy, and budget is … well, I won’t say “wasted.” “Not really germane to PM…” will suffice. And, if these efforts aren’t really germane to PM, they become value-neutral – at best. By shouldering organizational responsibilities outside of the PM discipline, they consume resources that would otherwise be used to generate the value PMOs ought to provide.

So, yeah, before we can have an intelligent discussion about how to increase the value brought by the PMO, let’s start by agreeing to not take it away.

This is going to be a tricky blog to write, so let me make one distinction up front: when I use the word “ignorant,” I’m specifically referring to Merriam-Webster’s second definition, “Unaware, Uninformed.”[i] Other definitions tend to include an aspect of a lack of intelligence, or some other form of mental inadequacy, and, for the purposes of this blog, that’s not what I’m talking about. Now, we are all probably familiar with how learning can be contagious, particularly as a member of a high-performing team. In medicine, there’s even an axiom for disseminating proper technique, “See it, do it, teach it.” It’s why, in organizations that value quality and performance, the more mature PMOs will tend to act as a macro-organizational enhancement, steadily increasing the odds that the projects in the portfolio will come in on-time, on-budget.

But the dark side of organization-wide learning is the very real possibility that the cumulative learned skills of the Project Team or PMO could unravel, leaving it weaker than it had been previously. This effect is more likely to come about under two circumstances:

• For Management and Operations (M&O) contractors at facilities attempting to deal with a long-standing PM problem, bringing in managers – particularly high-level ones – from other, similar facilities can be iffy, especially in destinations that perform a unique function. The reason is because people new to the hiring facility will likely not be familiar with many of the nuanced barriers to template-derived management strategies or technical approaches. The new executive may have been extremely effective in correcting a similar problem at another place and time, but the hard fact in many of these instances is that the barrier that can render this carried solution completely ineffective is both subtle and undefeated. New managers and executives hired from the outside, in my experience, will place a high value on loyalty within their new organization, not necessarily talent, meaning that the very members of the Project Team who are best able to assist in offering up course corrections are also the ones who will likely be seen as opposing the new manager, thereby eroding their organizational standing. It also means that the really-not-that-analogous solution being bolted on to the current problems will drive out better options by force of leveraging organizational power, reducing or even eliminating the chances of negotiating those very nuanced yet undefeated barriers.
• Then we have the situations where the manager(s) determining the technical approach did not attain their position through merit. Very few true meritocracies exist. The only one I’m aware of is United States Chess, where your ranking in that organization is your current points accumulated. Your score is what it is, and it alone determines your rank in USC. So, given that in the business world, the people in positions to make the final determination as to technical approach and implementation strategy didn’t necessarily attain those positions through merit, it stands to reason that some of those determinations will be flawed, perhaps irretrievably so. Hatfield’s Rule of Management #24 (a) clearly states that the first of the three critical characteristics of managerial leadership is the ability to identify the optimal, or at least workable, technical solution(s) to the problems being addressed by the Team. However, those who have attained positions of managerial leadership deficient in this ability, sometimes by even the smallest degree, will not only tend to default towards more familiar template-based solutions, I have seen them actively seek to defeat a better technical approach should it be offered up by any other Team member. Consider what this effect will have in the aggregate: the person pushing the sub-optimal, template technical strategy/implementation approach is overcoming the person advocating for the superior, if not truly optimal approach.

In each of these scenarios, ignorance is advancing at the expense of the macro-organization’s ability to effectively handle novel or difficult managerial problems. Essentially, ignorance has become contagious, and is working against the organization’s ability to make informed decisions on a consistent basis. And the sure-fire indicator that the ignorance-contagion effect is unfolding in your organization? It’s when the new/not meritorious exec finally comes to the realization that their techniques have failed, and places the blame directly on the insouciance of the Project Team in carrying out their flawed management strategies. This “explanation” almost always carries with it the assertion that their strategy would have been successful, if only upper management would have provided sufficient support, or backing (i.e., threatened to fire those members of the Project Team who failed to miraculously make the flawed approach actually work).

But here’s the thing: those “insouciant” Project Team members taking the blame for the failure were most likely the most educated ones, recognizing that the technical approach being pushed by the PM was flawed. As the stigma of failure gloms on to the educated, and insulates the unskilled PM from that failure, ignorance advances, and the managerial effectiveness of the macro-organization retreats, rendering ignorance very contagious indeed.

[i] Retrieved from https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/ignorant on March 26, 2023, 15:26 MDT.