Game Theory in Management

I think it’s fascinating that ProjectManagement.com’s theme for January has segued to “talent” from December’s “success,” since these two concepts are simultaneously so similar and yet so different. Probably the best analogy I can use to illustrate this dichotomy has to do with my insane family, and the card game Spades.

Spades is played by two two-person teams, and it’s really rather simple. The high card played takes the trick, and spades is the trump suit. Prior to playing each hand, the teams bid the number of tricks they believe they can capture, with every bid trick worth ten points, each trick over the bid number worth only one point, but with each trick bid but not captured resulting in ten points being subtracted from that team’s score. The game is a favorite at college dormitories throughout the United States, and was, for the longest time, the go-to game for my family’s reunions. There was just something about this particular game that brought out the highly competitive nature of my siblings, uncles and cousins, and more than one girlfriend of mine was scared off by witnessing my playing in Spades tournaments with these people. That was okay – I loved playing the game, particularly since, without a fairly advanced knowledge of practical tactics, the player was at such a disadvantage as to render them comically ill-suited to contend with those sharks.

I had a brother-in-law describe playing Spades in his college dorm with a fellow who had attended the University of Arkansas, whose mascot is the razorback pig. This fellow had a red felt hat in the shape of a razorback, and, when it was clear that the opposing team was about to go set (this occurs when a team has bid more tricks than it can take), would lean down to the table’s level so that the jaws of the felt razorback rested on the edge. He would then nod his head ever so slightly up-and-down, giving the illusion that the razorback was speaking, and say “You’re set! You’re set!”

Of course, winning at Spades is easier when you get dealt a lot of spades and face cards, and it’s almost impossible to lose when you get dealt a lot of face cards that are also spades. But it’s when you’re dealt hands with few spades or face cards that reveals your true level of talent. Typically, games are finished when one team reaches 300 points. The player who can keep within a good hand of the competition after being dealt two or three poor hands in a row will find themselves in a better position to take home the first-place trophy than those teams whose chances are dashed by a bit of bad luck in card distribution (yes, of course there were trophies! What kind of competition doesn’t have them?).

Meanwhile, back in the project management world…

I have noticed a subtle and yet remarkably consistent indicator of which PMs are truly talented, and which are, well, not. This one manager I worked with arrived at the project site insisting that the reports he received be of a very specific, non-generic format. So specific, in fact, that to fail to provide these reports to him on his accustomed schedule in his unique formats would result in, shall we say, some very negative energy being expended towards his staff. To be blunt, he would make their lives miserable if he didn’t have his precisely-formatted reports on-time, existing management information streams (even superior ones) be damned. He simply refused to adapt to what was in-place; everything had to be changed to that with which he was comfortable.

It would be analogous to a Spades player who couldn’t cope with the hand he was dealt unless he had three or more spades, at least one of which was a face card, with three other aces or kings in the remaining suits. Yeah, most hands dealt contain those aspects, but in Spades one does not throw in the hand if it does not meet a minimum expectation. For some reason, talent-poor managers try to do something analogous in PM space. If the information streams in existence (I’m assuming that at least a basic Earned Value for cost performance and Critical Path schedule are in-place) don’t look and feel familiar, these “managers” will spend excessive amounts of money and time recreating the formats with which they are accustomed, reminiscent of projects where they were perhaps more successful, but certainly more comfortable with their circumstances. It’s simply a fact that many of the projects we are assigned, either as the manager or team member, will be novel to the point of deviating dramatically from anything we’ve previously encountered, and our ability to adapt to the new circumstances will determine not only our chances for success, but indicate our innate level of talent. Low-talent players will seek (or even demand) a return to environs similar to those with which they are familiar. Talented PMs will adapt to their new circumstances, and play the best they can with the hand they’re dealt.

Will they always be successful? No. I’ve been in Spades tournaments where I was dealt fewer than two spades per hand for the entire time, and my partner didn’t fare much better. I lost most of those games, amidst notable jeering from my insane family.

But a few times, my talented partner and I would actually pull out a victory that would not have happened if we had simply waited for better hands to be dealt. With or without red felt pig hats tormenting us.

In previous posts I’ve discussed the unfortunate but very real phenomena of having a portion of the project team opposed to success, if success means that you, the PM, will benefit personally. Imagine your organization depicted by a bell curve. The split looks like this:

• Category A is more than one standard deviation to the left side of the curve, and represents the so-called early adapters. These people are attracted by the novel, and were probably among the ones who purchased Beta-Max format VCRs (and, if you don’t know what a Beta-Max VCR is, I don’t want to hear from you). Since your project is probably creating something that’s not been done before, at least in some context, these people tend to be your natural allies.
• Category B people range from the median or mode, and consume that part of the curve to the left up to where the Category A-ers are. These people can be counted on to become allies eventually, but need to be shown or convinced that cooperation with your project’s agenda will benefit them.
• Category C people are to the right of the median or mode, extending (generally speaking) one sigma to the right. They are not allies – at best they can be described as unwilling participants. They only end up contributing when it is made painfully obvious (and, yes, I do mean “painfully”) that to fail to do so will result in unacceptable consequences for them. They almost literally have to be forced to do their jobs. It’s unfortunate, but these people are real.
• Category D people are on the tail-end of the curve to the right, and will oppose you, no matter what. Even when it becomes clear that further resistance to your technical approaches or strategies is futile, they will find a way to oppose you, through the “slow-roll” or “silent veto” tactics, or else via calumny, rumor, or out-and-out slander. I know it’s highly disconcerting to consider that such people are on your team, but they invariably are, and it’s dangerous to pretend they aren’t.

Don’t believe me? Consider the story of Joe Rochefort.

U.S. Navy Officer Joe Rochefort was the cryptologist who led the team that cracked the Japanese Imperial Navy’s JN25 code in the early months of the Pacific Theater of World War II. From the American entry into the war through early June of 1942, the Japanese Navy experienced one success after another, and the situation was dire for the Allies. After breaking parts of the Imperial Navy’s top-secret code, Rochefort became convinced that the next major attack would come against Midway Island, in the northern Pacific, but almost all of his colleagues disagreed. One ally in OP-20-G suggested a ruse, to announce in an open transmission that Midway was short of drinking water. The Japanese took the bait, and transmitted in their JN25 Code that their next target was low on drinking water. Rochefort was right.

With this knowledge, OP-20-G would render to the Midway Force’s commanding officer, Raymond Spruance, virtually the entire Imperial Navy order of battle for their attack on Midway, intelligence with a value that cannot be overestimated. The Americans were out-numbered, both in ships and planes, and the IJN personnel were better trained and more experienced. They were, in fact, outclassed in every single way but one: the USN had the Japanese order of battle, thanks to Rochefort. The Japanese weren’t even aware that the United States Navy had a presence in the area until well after the battle had been joined.

The result of the ensuing battle has been accurately described as the turning point of the Pacific War. The Japanese lost four front-line aircraft carriers, dozens of planes with irreplaceable crews, and the initiative in the Pacific. The Americans lost one already-damaged carrier, the Yorktown, a minority of the aircraft committed, and a handful of support vessels. If ever the margin of victory in a major battle could be attributed to a single individual, the result of the Battle of Midway being materially brought about by Joe Rochefort’s cryptology breakthrough has to qualify as a leading candidate. So, Rochefort was recognized, rewarded, promoted, right?

Unfortunately, no. Apparently, Rochefort didn’t suffer fools gladly, and had several encounters with one on a previous assignment aboard the battleship Pennsylvania. This particular fool ended up on Ernest King’s (then Commander in Chief of the Navy) staff. This person disliked Rochefort personally, and strongly advised against him receiving any recognition for his work. Keep in mind that Rochefort had just contributed mightily to changing the course of the Pacific War and, by extension, the future of Western Civilization. No matter. He had made an enemy, and this enemy would have his revenge. Rochefort ended up receiving the Legion of Merit, Navy Distinguished Service Medal, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and was inducted into the National Security Agency’s Central Security Service Hall of Fame; however, only the Legion of Merit was awarded to him while he was alive. All of the other awards where given posthumously.

I think any manager, but especially Project Managers, need to keep in mind that, in those instances where you have achieved notable success, anybody within your organization who had opposed you, your ideas, or the scope you pursued stands to lose status as their opposition is revealed to be misguided at best, and treacherous at worst. And, if they fall under Category D above, you know they are perfectly capable of using calumny or slander to mitigate the damage to their status via throwing shade on your accomplishments.

Have you experienced a high-profile success recently? Good for you.

Now watch your back.

I know, I know, I’ve written quite a bit about how certain science fiction franchises, specifically Star Wars and Star Trek, appear to have some parallels with the Project Management universe, but this particular parallel is so strong that I can’t resist connecting the dots. Some fans of Star Trek: The Original Series began writing stories around the characters and settings of that television series since its cancellation in 1969 (if not before), and many of these stories made their way into “zines” (short for “magazines,” zines are amateur-published/posted periodicals). Unfortunately, most (if not the vast majority) of these contributors weren’t professional writers, or even particularly gifted amateurs, and it reflected in their prose in a variety of ways (poor character development, lack of respect for the pre-existing canon, wretched plot structure). One particular writing pathology that became noticeable as a trend was the introduction of extraordinarily young and talented characters whose exceptionalism strained credulity. Usually female, these characters came to be seen as little more than the authors’ projection of an idealized version of themselves into the Star Trek canon, and gained the nickname “Mary Sue.”[i]

Mary Sues tend to have the following characteristics in common:

• They are young (often “the youngest to ever graduate Star Fleet Academy”),
• attractive females, usually with some striking or unusual feature, like violet eyes or blazing red hair.
• They have some sort of pre-existing relationship with one of the three main ST:TOS characters (Kirk, Spock, McCoy),
• and are capable in the extreme, in their scholastic achievement, martial arts prowess, or technical insights.

While the existence of Mary Sues in a given story would invariably render that narrative less believable and the plot, well, amateurish, their preponderance actually led to a backlash due to the perceived damage they were doing to the existing Star Trek canon, challenging previously-accepted tenets of who the already-established characters were, and how they interacted with each other and their fictionalized, futuristic world.

Meanwhile, Back In The Project Management World…

I’ve noticed that the fare in PM-themed periodicals and seminars can be largely categorized in one of three ways:

• genuine advancements in management science (which are golden but not as common as they should be),
• yet another re-telling of the basics, almost always of Earned Value Management techniques, but also including Critical Path Methodology, scope management, or risk analysis,
• a story about how a particular project was ground-breaking, high-profile, technically advanced, and, of course, completed successfully.

It’s this last category that tended to bore me the most, until I realized we in the Project Management world were experiencing our own version of the Mary Sue effect in Star Trek fan literature. Then this type of story moved from the merely boring and into the realm of positively irksome, and thence on to potentially damaging to the existing PM canon.

Think about it: when was the last time you read or saw any kind of presentation that detailed exactly how and why a project disaster occurred, and who specifically was to blame? I never have. In fact, I’ve attended a presentation (at a project management-themed conference, no less) that discussed one of the largest overrun and delayed projects in history, and the presenter only wanted to talk about how swell the concepts of Earned Value and Critical Path were.

Conversely, in presentations that address notable successful projects, it seems that many people were solely responsible for its victories, particularly the presenter. Could it be that we have our very own version of the Mary Sue effect in play? Consider the following table:

In Star Trek fan literature, the backlash against stories that contain Mary Sues has become so widespread that many authors that indulge in that genre will avoid introducing any female character, for fear of having such an introduction tagged with the “Mary Sue” label, and automatically repelling potential consumers of the work. While this may be a bit extreme, it was, nevertheless, probably necessary to ensure that this particularly cheesy character device be avoided in the future. Similarly, I would be happy to initiate an analogous backlash against those specific-project presentations that employ a similar device to the Mary Sue. They don’t advance project management science much, if at all, while providing an avenue for the project teams’ (or individual presenters’) own aggrandizement.

And that, my friends, strains credulity, and ultimately damages the pre-existing canon. Particularly if said presenter has violet eyes, or blazing red hair.

[i] Retrieved from https://fanlore.org/wiki/Mary_Sue, 17 December 2017, 10:40 MST.

In the 1972 Olympics Men’s Basketball final, the team from the U.S.S.R. was awarded the victory by the officials, even though they did not legitimately win the ball game. With three seconds left in the game, and with the U.S.A. team leading 50-49, the Soviets needed three different rulings from the referees to score the winning goal, to wit:

• The clock ran out due to the Soviets mis-handling the communications to indicate if and when they wanted a time out, so the referees put three seconds back.
• Even if they had appropriately requested and received a time out, they would not have been able to substitute players, or take the time needed to strategize on a play, both of which were allowed to happen.
• After in-bounding once, and exhausting the remaining three seconds without scoring, they were given another three seconds and another opportunity, since the clock hadn’t been properly reset.

There were other irregularities, any of which would have also prevented the gold medals from going to the Soviets (including blatantly improper interference in an on-going game by Renato Jones, secretary general of the FIBA at the time), but you see the point. The only way that the Soviets could be considered successful is if it’s okay to change the rules in the middle of the game. And, just for the record, a sure sign that either the game is rigged or the authorities aren’t really experts is that the rules keep changing.

A few months back I was blogging about how some PM aficionados, whom I named “processors,” were more concerned that what they saw as correct, proper procedures should be followed during project execution than whether or not the project itself was successful. Their (sane) counterparts, who were more concerned with actual project performance, I dubbed “producers,” and complained about how the processors were doing little more than making the producers’ professional life more difficult.

I stressed in last week’s blog that the oft-overlooked, but obvious central point about Project Management is that the projects’ scope needs to actually be executed, the best way the project team knows how. In short, the “rules” for the producers can be reduced to two: (1) finish the project on-time, and (2) on-budget. These two rules do not change in the world of the producers. Conversely, the processors seem to change the rules all the time. They do so in the cavalcade of presentations, webinars, and guidance documents being generated -- and I stand by my assertion about what's going on when the rules seem to be constantly changing.

I have made pointed criticisms of Tom Peters’ work, but I have to hand it to him: his approach on In Search of Excellence was insightful and inspired. Rather than sit around his University office and speculate how organizations could improve performance based on abstract data or theories, he sought out high-performing organizations, and asked them what they were doing differently from their competitors. He was rewarded with a best-selling book, as he should have been. This is much, much closer to performing real management science than most (if not all) of what the processors do, in that Peters observed which organizations were verifiably performing better than their competitors, and then sought out the dependent variables. Compare and contrast this to, say, the communications managers (yes, the risk guys are an easier target here, but I pick on them so regularly I thought, just this week, I’d give them a break). When was the last time you heard a seminar paper, or webinar, presented by the communications specialists, where they did something similar to what Tom Peters did, i.e., seek out success, and interview those associated with it how they did it? I never have. Rather, it seems they are always prattling on about how, by following their rules for proper PM (recently updated, don’t you know), which requires performing the kinds of analyses and techniques they promote, you are “doing” PM “correctly.” In reality, the best they could hope to do in real PM space is to assert that a preponderance of projects that do perform their techniques come in on-time and on-budget, but even here they would have an almost impossible task of establishing the communications program as the proximate cause, or even a material cause of the project’s success. None of them would ever say that their project came in on-time, on-budget due solely to their enhanced communications plan. It just never seems to work out that way.

Unless, of course, you are attempting to assert that the reason for your blatant lack of success is because the scorer’s table failed to recognize your communicated desire for a time out in the final seconds of an Olympic championship game. In that case, you just might get away with it.

According to a history of architecture website named Quatr.us, in the twelfth century

Somebody (nobody knows who) invented the flying buttress. Instead of the buttress being stuck to the side of the building, it would form an arch leading away from the building.

The flying buttress would start from the places at the top of the wall where the groin vaults were directing the weight of the roof. From there, the flying buttresses would carry the weight of the roof away from the building and down a column of stone to the ground. It wouldn’t matter what the walls were made of anymore, because they wouldn’t be carrying the weight of the roof.[i]

Other examples of flying buttresses in building interiors appear as an unsupported column top, with its load-bearing utility not being intuitively obvious. Essentially, the flying buttress allowed the weight of the structure to be diverted away from the walls.

Another act of diversion, this one pertaining to human behavior, has to do with the oft-used cliché, that success has many parents, but failure is an orphan. I know when I hear that phrase cited my first notion of its meaning has to do with a somewhat jaded view of human nature, that we’re imminently susceptible to crafting or altering a narrative to make ourselves appear to be a vital part of a winning team, but hardly involved at all if the same (in this case, project) team crashes and burns.

But taken together with another axiom, this one a quote from Charles Kettering, “99 percent of success is built on failure,”[ii] and a larger insight emerges. It goes without saying that, if we don’t own our mistakes, we never learn from them. But what happens when we glom on to successes where we did not provide the material cause, much less the proximate cause, of the favorable outcome? I think we see this very outcome on-display at so many PM-themed conferences, seminars, podcasts and guidance documents, that of attribution of success to some very questionable management science hypotheses.

Meanwhile, Back In The Project Management World…

Take, for example, the practice of time-phasing an Estimate to Complete (ETC). This rather silly practice has the full-throated approval of that guidance-generating-organization-that-must-not-be-named. It assumes several premises, including:

• The ETC is derived from re-estimating remaining work (on a line-item level, no less) on an already-started project, instead of using the simple, accurate formula ETC = Estimate at Completion (EAC) – cumulative actuals;
• Useful or relevant information can be gleaned from comparing budgets to actuals, and
• Staffing decisions are based on differences between budgets and actual costs, rather than the nature of the remaining scope on the project.

These assumptions are suspect at best, and completely fraudulent at worst, being, as they are, poorly (or completely un-) supported by repeatable observations in a setting that would allow isolation of the dependent variables upon which the assertion depends. In other words, there is absolutely no evidence, not even a single instance, of a project owing its success to its ability to time-phase its ETC. These assertions are simply arrived at by a bunch of self-anointed experts, who publish their findings opinions with vague but impassioned support phrases such as “Doing X is key to project success.”  Really? Can we see the data that supports that assertion? Even a single example of how X is “key” to a specific project’s success?

And the time-phased ETC example is but one of many. Enhanced analysis techniques in risk management, communications management, quality management … the list goes on and on, with no hard data supporting the assertions, but with the ubiquitous “…is necessary (or “key,” “essential,” or “central”) to project success” contained in a nearby paragraph. It’s maddening, really.

Here’s the painfully-obvious-to-the-most-casual-observer essential element of project success: execute the scope. All of the analysis techniques inherent in Project Management have the singular function of reflecting the project teams’ performance as they execute the scope. Some of those analysis techniques are truly “key,” with Earned Value and Critical Path methodologies popping to mind. But many of these others are not, and not only that, they actually divert time and energy away from that load-bearing component of project success, executing the scope. And, to that end, they represent the very opposite of the things that are “essential” to project success.

I kind of like comparing those pushing these unsupported and unsupportable assertions about what is “key” to project success to flying buttresses. It sounds like I’m calling them a juvenile and semi-profane name, when I am, in fact, referring to them as an architectural feature. So, it is in that spirit that I can say to these “experts,” metaphorically speaking, of course, and sincerely: stop being flying buttresses.

[i] Retrieved from https://quatr.us/architecture/flying-buttress-history-architecture.htm on December 3, 2017, 9:55 MST.

[ii] Retrieved from https://www.huffingtonpost.com/mitch-ditkoff/innovation-quotations_b_1971546.html on December 3, 2017, 8:12 MST.