Communication Excellence in Project Management

One-hundred and forty-one years ago, a charismatic but, vain leader made a bad decision that cost him his life and (almost) all the lives of the people who served under him. General Armstrong Custer decided to fight a force of 2,500+ Indian warriors with only 210 men under his command. John Hollon, well-known HR guru, has argued that we should memorialize June 25th as a cautionary warning of the perils of bad management.

What made Custer's decision so wrong? According to Hollon, five factors:

1. Refusing to listen to others.
2. Arrogance.
3. Didn't focus on the goal.
4. His opponent had a better strategy AND people that could be trusted to execute the strategy.
5. Bad luck.

Personally, I am not sure that the fifth factor wasn't just a natural result of the first four factors. Even so, when I've seen projects go off track and even ultimately fail, I bet you could trace one or more reasons back to one or more these factors.

As a project manager, take time on Saturday to reflect on Custer's Last Stand and think of how you can prevent your current project from being your last stand.

Just finished an excellent book on how to rethink failure. In Matthew Syed's book, Black Box Thinking: Why Most People Never Learn from Their Mistakes - But Some Do, he explains how aviation's approach to learning from failure made flying one of the safest industries on the planet.In contrast, how medicine approaches failure has led to medical accidents being a major hazard to patients.

In aviation, accidents and errors are treated as learning opportunities. This is why the black box exists; to collect telemetric data and cockpit conversations to be used in investigations. As Syed points out, there is no stigma attached to error (unless there was clearly negligence by the flight crew) but a focus on never repeating the mistake again.

Whereas, in the medical field, error is stigmatized which encourages doctors and nurses to hide mistakes and shift blame to external events or even to the patient. Syed recounts some shocking statistics on the dangers posed by doctors and nurses refusing to learn from their mistakes.

I found Syed's chapters on cognitive dissonance to be especially useful. Some interesting ideas on how to encourage black box thinking in teams. The key is to redefine failure from something to be feared to an opportunity to grow. In fact, Syed spends a good deal of time on the merits of the growth mindset.

This is a great read for project managers on how to encourage project team members to foster a growth mindset and learn from project risks.

Interesting piece in Mind Tools giving some reasons why projects fail. Consider the six reasons listed in the article:

1. The wrong business requirements have been addressed
2. It's not possible to deliver the business case
3. Governance is poor
4. Implementation is poor
5. People lose focus on the project's benefits
6. The environment changes

The first five can all be traced to poor communication. Communication about the need for the project, what the project should deliver, managing the project, and executing the project.

Even the sixth reason, "[t]he environment changes," can be affected by the quality of communication. Someone should notice the environmental changes and could alert the rest of the project stakeholders. But, without good communication practices or a culture that encourages open communication, environmental changes can go unnoticed or underestimated until real harm to the project has occurred.

This is why I argue that every failed project is due to poor communication.