PMI Global Insights

By Erik Agudelo
Founder, Play Learn Develop

Have we always been afraid of technology? Is it a human trait to be afraid of new developments that we don’t yet understand? But does that have the potential to impact the way we work, learn, and live?

Some people say yes, it’s a human trait, almost a survival mechanism, to be afraid of the unknown. On the other hand, others tell us that humanity’s thirst for exploration, combined with our creativity, is what sets us apart from other animals. Some say these traits have allowed us, people, to expand and conquer almost every corner of the world.

In my view, both approaches are right. Also, both approaches are wrong. Sorry, this is just one of those questions that cannot be answered taking a binary approach. Person A may not like changing jobs. Person B may not like trying new kinds of food. But person A’s static approach to their job situation does not reflect on how they adopt new technologies at home (i.e., choice of mobile and computer and use of appliances interconnected via the internet). Person B may change their diet radically after an unexpected event in their lives. 

It would appear that we alternate between taking on new challenges, new technologies, and sticking to the rivers we know. We alternate between change and stability.

OK, but where does that leave us with regards to our alleged fear of “machines taking the decision-making ability from us humans”? Are we simultaneously both afraid and not afraid of artificial intelligence (AI)? Is this just like Schrodinger’s cat – which is both simultaneously alive and dead?

No, we are not simultaneously both afraid and not afraid of AI. We just change our minds too easily about abstract subjects we haven’t had the time, opportunity, or interest to research and learn about. 

While we are on this topic, I just want to take the opportunity to invite you to never attempt to explain human behavior by using theories (or worse, isolated and oversimplified one-liners) from fields such as physics, engineering, and mathematics. This is extremely misleading (for more on this subject, check out the book Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of ScienceFashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont).

The news we read in the morning has the power to alter the decisions we make throughout the day. More importantly, that process occurs unconsciously. 

Nearly every day, when I open Netflix, I smile at how devilishly smart targeted advertising is being used by this innovative company.

Among many other dimensions of my life, I’m gay and I support women in power. Of course this reflects on the choice of movies, TV series, and documentaries I watch on Netflix. I laugh when I see all Netflix content presented to me through covers showcasing two men, or sometimes even more, looking at each other in potentially romantic ways. And they manage to find these shots even in the most non-gay friendly material ever produced (e.g., the TV series “Friends” from the 90’s).

Undoubtedly, AI has the potential, and the power, to influence how we make decisions. At Play Learn Develop, we harvest this power to ensure better decision-making and support organizational transformation.

Although it seems to me that that very same power is being used to spread misinformation about the risks of AI, it truly worries me when a transformation director says, “I don’t want a machine to make decisions for me. I prefer to trust my gut.”

Interested in learning more and continuing the conversation? Join me at the PMI Virtual Experience Series event on 6 October in Session 405: Datos del Comportamiento Humano e Inteligencia Artificial ¿El Futuro o Temor? and the English presentation on 7 October in Session 423: Behavioral Data and Artificial Intelligence: The Future of Transformations, or Managers’ Biggest Fears?  I hope to see you at the event.

By Donna D. Gregorio, PMP
Department Head, The MITRE Corporation

According to a recent Forbes study, four out of 10 tech leaders are failing due to the lack of effort that the industry puts into developing its leaders.  As a seasoned tech leader, I’m here to help you become an expert in IT project management, with practical guidance from my own hard-earned lessons learned.  I believe most technical project managers do not have the right skills, leaving them open to failures and cancellations. I realized I wanted to teach others how to be better project managers, so I signed up to teach graduate school classes. My students’ interest piqued when I told stories of my professional experiences. Now, I have used these techniques to formulate the path to project success.

Telling stories of project challenges helps to illustrate the three most challenging moments in every project.  Imagine a project that did not ascertain an adequate budget prior to recommending an expensive solution that stakeholders inevitably rejected. Envision the project that used a half-dozen project managers to collect status reports and were subsequently fired when the team’s value came into question. Picture the project nearing completion but still had a huge to-do list that did not have a clearly defined outcome, so the team was shocked when stakeholders ended the project when they least expected. These real-life scenarios will resonate with the audience as we discuss avoidance techniques and skills to round out your toolkit.
 

If you’re interested in hearing these and other stories of conquering project challenges, join me on 6 October at the PMI Virtual Experience Series, where we explore the skills and techniques to make you an irreplaceable - not irrelevant - project manager in Session 404: The Three Most Challenging Moments That Can Make or Break Any Project.

By N. Christine Aykac, PMI-ACP, PMI-RMP, PMP
Project Coach/Learning Strategist
Acuna Consulting

According to the Harvard Business Review (HBR), companies are pouring millions into “digital transformation” initiatives. However, a high percentage of those efforts fail to pay off.  According to HBR, that’s because companies are jumping on specific technology initiatives. In short, most organizations see digital transformation as a project with start and end dates, and they are working towards an end date. On the way, most of them are measuring the transformation efforts based on the output of a project, and their assessments are related to key activities within those projects.

As you may know, upgrading a system, implementing a new process, and setting up a new service are all projects. Within the transformation strategy, you will have projects to improve your systems, but the transformation is not a project, whether digital, agile, or business transformation. There is no end to any transformation efforts because continuous improvement is an ongoing, never-ending effort. Once you reach the optimal state, there would be innovations, the market will change, new needs will arise, and you will be continuing improvements, adapting new methods, and changing your processes. 

Experts call this era the fourth industrial revolution, or simply the “digital revolution.” Yes, I believe it is part of the industrial revolution series, but I’d like to bring your attention to one thing: Digital revaluation is not linear anymore, like the previous ones! The second industrial revolution followed the previous one about 100 years later, like electrical power following the steam power, improving how we produce products. On the other hand, the digital revolution impacts everything: our social lives, our culture and how we behave. That’s why I believe the transformation is a lifelong journey. That’s why we should look at transformation-related activities from a different angle. It is a maturity process that goes in cycles. 

Technology, systems, and applications will help you with your digital transformation efforts, but they are not the drivers of the digital transformation. A mindset of the organization and accepting the change is never-ending; it is a continuous key endeavor here. So, when assessing the digital transformation efforts, one needs to look at the multi-dimensional way. Similar to the digital revolution, digital transformation is not linear.

I identified a few dimensions for you to consider:

•    Systems: Available tools and infrastructure for employees, customers, partners.
•    Business Model: How value is delivered in the industry, i.e., traditional - bricks and mortar, or you are a startup, sailing on uncharted waters.
•    Organizational Culture: Current organizational mindsets, culture, and structure. Collaboration and business functions how are they working. 
•    Processes: Current organizational process, i.e., is decision-making hierarchal, lean and collaborative or a one-man show. How about your business ecosystems - holistic or descriptive? 
•    People: Available talent and their capabilities; how much are your people participating in the digital transformation activities? Are they aware that their organization is going through a digital transformation?

You may ask, “Is that all?” Not at all; however, I’d like to keep it short and simple. You might include or exclude other dimensions important for your businesses, such as the environment of your organizations’ functions. These dimensions are just to give you an idea on how to decide which dimensions should be included in your transformation’s efforts. 

Sometimes organizations focus solely on technology or processes. Failure to address all dimensions related to your business leaves significant value on the table. New technologies create substantial opportunities, but corporations that don’t recognize and pursue transformation in a multi-dimensional way may find themselves missing out on these opportunities. 

How can you measure the maturity of your transformation efforts? First, you should answer the “why.” Why should you measure the maturity of your transformation efforts? 

As you may know, maturity is related to the degree of formality and continuous optimization of processes. Thus, the maturity spans from ad-hoc practices to formally defined steps and actively optimizing processes, systems, operations, and so forth. Maturity assessments are not a one-time exercise; you should be running them periodically as an operational activity, not a project. It also helps to identify an organization’s maturity in a number of areas and points out the areas of improvement. Maturity models are valuable tools for benchmarking capability that give an incremental target for improvements. It provides a starting point for moving forward and reaching our goals.

As mentioned, digital transformation is not a project, and there are multiple dimensions to any transformation efforts. So, how can you reach an acceptable level of maturity within your organization? How can you bring your teams to a “collective thinking” state to improve the effectiveness of your efforts? Once you have a realistic answer, you should apply a very simple model to measure the maturity level.
 

Interested in learning more and furthering the dialogue? Join me on Wednesday, 6 October, at the PMI Virtual Experience Series event and attend Session 403: Measuring the Maturity of Your Digital Transformation Efforts.

By Archana Shetty, PMP
Founder and CEO, WELEAD

Won’t you agree that the pandemic has exposed some of the weakest links in organizations?

Over the past year and a half, the pandemic has caused many people to rethink their priorities. Workers are making decisions to leave based on how their employers treated them. For many others, it’s the stress of increasing workload and burnout. Research from Qualtrics shows that stress and burnout are the main reasons people are thinking of leaving their jobs in the coming months and year — a time economists are calling “The Great Resignation.”

At the same time, customers are demanding more. They want better, faster products and services.

This poses an interesting challenge for leaders. On the one hand, rapidly adapting or pivoting to the changing needs of the customers is essential, and on the other hand keeping employees motivated during uncertain times is crucial. One of the leaders described this as a “tug of war” and another manager said he was sandwiched between different stakeholders who seemed to be on opposite ends of the spectrum. As a result, they felt anxious, lonely and unsupported. 

So how do you juggle multiple demands while maintaining your own sanity?

To be able to succeed and thrive in this new, ever-changing world, you need news tools and new skills. You cannot rely on the same systems and methods that got you here. You need to reimagine your ways of working, reskill your people, and redesign your work environment to facilitate the next level of collaboration and achieve your larger goal. I call this collaborative leadership.

Equipping leaders to adapt to uncertainty, helping teams to not only bounce back but grow from setbacks, and creating a workplace where teams can collaborate and thrive is becoming increasingly important and urgent. 

Most companies I have spoken with are saying that they are promoting well-being and a collaborative culture, but the reality is that very few of those actually have concrete strategies for how they're going to get there. Conducting a yoga session or offering a gym membership to your stressed out employee does not address the root cause. I also see leaders offering additional vacation time, or a week off to give employees a break. These are all helpful measures, but they’re usually not enough to turn things around on a long-term basis. 

The good news is that well-being and collaboration can be cultivated at workplaces if leaders get intentional about making the required changes in themselves, in their teams and in the culture. Here I would like to echo the words of Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn, “I believe that a strong culture is critical to companies that hope to scale. But truly strong company cultures emerge only when every employee feels they personally own the culture.” (Hoffman, Masters of Scale Podcast, 2020)
I believe we can improve well-being and create a collaborative culture by optimizing both human and machine intelligence so we can achieve both efficient and effective outcomes together and make a lasting impact in our world.

If you’re interested in exploring the concepts behind collaborative leadership in greater detail, join me in Session 418: Collaborative Leadership in the Age of Artificial Intelligence on 7 October at 1:30 a.m. EDT US/Eastern at the PMI Virtual Experience Series 2021.

By Yoram Solomon
Founder
Innovation Culture Institute LLC

In a survey of 60 project managers, I found that the strongest agreement (4.5 out of 5) was with the statement “Building trust in the project team is part of the project manager’s role.” The second strongest was the statement “The level of trust in the project team has influence on the project performance.” In last place was the statement “I have the right tools to build trust in the project team.” Research supports the top statements. A 2015 study of 102 projects in different industries found that in high-risk projects, trust had a 45% positive impact on project performance, four times more than authoritarian control. Yet, while risk is well addressed in project management publications, trust is not. The word “risk” appears 2,079 times in PMBOK (6th Ed.), which has a whole 64-page chapter dedicated to “Project Risk Management,” while the word “trust” appears only 45 times. The word “risk” appears 103 times and in the title of 17 terms in the PMI Lexicon of Project Management Terms, while the word “trust” appears there - wait for it - not a single time. It is time to talk about how project managers can build trust, which is also the topic of my upcoming PMI Virtual Experience Series session.

Historically, the field of project management focused on control and coordination of project resources. Only recently, “soft skills” were starting to get more attention and for a good reason. My survey found that 75% of project managers stated that the project team didn’t report to them organizationally, 59% were not in the same group as the project manager, and 21% were not even in the same company. Furthermore, 84% of project managers indicated that the project team doesn’t work in the same building as them, 77% are not in the same city, and 45% are not even in the same country! Under such conditions, it is clear why the existence of trust would be critical to the success of the project, and why you, the project manager, are in such an important position to influence it.

So, what is trust, really?

In this article (and in my upcoming session) I will describe what trust is through the eight laws of trust, explain what makes a person trusted through my six-component trust model, show you a seven-step process to build trust, and give you a tool that will help you build trust in your project team such that you will gain those 45% project improvements.

Over the past 13 years I have observed eight laws of trust:
1.    Trust is continuous. It is not binary. There are different levels of trust required in different situations. 
2.    Trust is contextual. You don’t have to trust (or be trusted) in all areas of life. You (and other members of the project team) should trust (and be trusted) in the specific context of your role on the team. 
3.    Trust is relative. You will not be trusted the same way by different people. In fact, you can be trusted a lot by one person, and not trusted at all by another. 
4.    Trust is asymmetrical. Trust is a two-way street, but one person will not necessarily trust the other the same way the other will trust the first. 
5.    Trust is transferrable. If I trust you, and you trust another person, I may trust the other person based on the trust I have in you and you have in them. 
6.    Trust is reciprocal. It’s not only that if you’re trustworthy you will earn my trust. If I trust you, and I show you that I trust you, you will behave in a trustworthy way.
7.    Trust is dynamic. It changes all the time. Less between interactions and more during interactions. 
8.    Trust is two-sided. The trust that people have in you is a product of their own trustability (willingness to trust other people) and your trustworthiness. There is almost nothing you can do about the former, and everything you can do about the latter. 

The latter part of the last law is why I feel strongly that the building block of trust is individual trustworthiness, which is what my six-component trust model focuses on. So, what makes a person trusted (or not so)? 

The first set of components is made of who you are:
1.    Competence. This is the professional, technical, mostly objective component. You are ranked on a scale from being completely incompetent to being the best there is in your role. In my research, I found a 58.4% correlation between competence and trustworthiness. 
2.    Personality compatibility. This is the emotional, subjective, and sometimes even irrational component. This indicates how compatible your and the other person’s personalities are. You don’t have to have the same personalities, but they must be compatible. The range here is from the universal/absolute values, with universal good and bad (e.g., telling the truth vs. lying), to the merely different (risk-takes vs. risk-averse, introverts vs. extroverts, etc.) in which none is bad, but they still must be compatible to build trust. I found an 86% correlation between personality compatibility and trustworthiness. 
3.    Symmetry. This is the situational component that is driven by perspective. Are you and the other person on the same side or on opposite sides? Is there a common galvanizing mission or challenge, a common enemy, or do you compete for promotions? Are your contributions (and what you get) symmetrical or asymmetrical? Are you treating each other (and being treated) fairly or unfairly? I found a 32% correlation between symmetry and trustworthiness.

The second set of components is made of what you do (specifically, during an interaction with the other person):
1.    Positivity. What is your contribution to the interaction? This ranges from total BS and completely self-centered attitude on one end of the scale to being a “straight shooter” and putting others ahead of yourself on the other end. You should also know that research showed that we respond much stronger (negatively) to negative interactions than we do (positively) to positive interactions. 
2.    Time. The more frequently and the longer you interact with the other person, the more your positivity (for better or worse) affects the trust between you. 
3.    Intimacy. How do you interact with the other person? Is it mainly through words (e.g., email and text messages) or in-person? Research showed that we trust people whose nonverbal communications are consistent with their verbal ones, and we distrust people whose nonverbal and verbal communications are inconsistent. The more intimate your interactions are with the other person, the more your positivity (for better or worse) affects the trust between you.

For this second set of components, I have not yet researched the correlation with trustworthiness.

How does someone build their trustworthiness? I developed a proprietary seven-step process for that:

1.    Identify the relationship in which you want to be trusted. Trust is relative, and every relationship must be treated differently. 
2.    Find out what you are doing wrong that is holding you back from being more trusted. Remember that bad is much stronger than good. 
3.    Identify a new habit that will eliminate that one bad thing you are currently doing. 
4.    Set a Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-based goal. 
5.    Measure and log what you are doing. 
6.    Appoint an accountability partner. This will reduce the probability that you will not achieve your goal by 90%. 
7.    Turn this into a habit. This will take time, persistence and, most of all, having your accountability partner stay involved. 

Well, that’s how you become more trusted, but how can you, the project manager, build trust in your project team? For that purpose, I am developing a tool I call TrusTracker360™, based on Google Sheets. I will describe the tool in my upcoming session, and the process is as follows:

•    First, you must identify dependency relationships. Not everyone in the project team depends on everyone else on that team.
•    Find and rank those dependencies from “none” to “critical.” Then, get the trustors (those who must trust) to rank the trustees (those who must be trusted because there is a strong dependency on them). Those rankings are anonymous but will give every trustee a score along the six components of the trust model, as well as an overall trust score, based on a 47-item questionnaire. 
•    Finally, a matrix will correlate dependencies with trustworthiness levels and help you identify critical trust issues where you should intervene and help build trust, or make tough decisions and break up relationships that cannot be fixed. But only if you want to improve project performance by 45%.

Interested in learning more and furthering the dialogue? Join me in Session #406: Tools to Identify and Fix Trust Breakdowns in Project Teams at the PMI’s 6-7 October Virtual Experience Series Event on Wednesday, 6 October.