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.

I just finished Grant Avery's excellent book on managing risks in projects - Project Management, Denial, and the Death Zone. Grant uses examples from expeditions to Mt. Everest and the Antarctica to describe how project teams increase their risky behavior. Essentially, when project teams survive a near-miss and increase their capacity to survive risks, the project teams take on more risk. It is like climbing a rickety ladder. Some climbers keep climbing up the rungs despite how much the ladder sways and bends.

It is because some individuals have a higher risk appetite. Risk appetite is the difference between an individual's abilities and ambition. The wider the gap, the bigger the appetite. Even organizations have risk appetites. A major affect from big risk appetites is that an individual's risk homeostasis (level of risk acceptance) keeps resetting to higher and higher levels. This can also happen to teams and organizations which explains the Challenger and Columbia disasters (the "normalization of deviance" effect).

Grant introduces a framework to deal with out-of-control risk appetites along with some promising research on what makes great project leaders. A great read but there is one major piece missing - the vital role of communication in dealing with project risk and the key to great leadership. The word "communication" is not even in the index.

There is some interesting possibilities for project management communication research here . . .