Easy in theory, difficult in practice

I am midway through Annie Duke's latest book Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away. If you are not already familiar with Annie's background, she was a very successful professional poker player who applied the lessons she learned from playing poker to writing and consulting on improving how we make decisions.

Her latest book tackles the challenges we face with knowing when it is the right time to quit.

While her book provides lots of good advice with supporting case studies, two had particular applicability to project delivery.

The first is the well known phenomenon of sunk cost fallacy.

While decisions regarding whether to continue investing in a project or product should ignore the effort or costs incurred to date, this rarely happens in practice. The fact that we have spent that money and time reduces our ability to evaluate the go/no go decision in an unbiased manner. And, as Annie rightly points out in her book, you can't Jedi Mind Trick your way into evaluating the decision with fresh eyes.

But to make matters worse, there is the impact of juggling monkeys!

This metaphor was developed by Astro Teller who heads up Alphabet's "moonshot" X company. You would like to hold a show in which a monkey juggles flaming torches while it stands on a pedestal. There are two main deliverables for this project beyond getting a monkey: training the monkey and getting a pedestal.

The first deliverable is challenging as it requires you to train the monkey to juggle multiple torches, to help the monkey overcome its fear of fire and finally to convince the monkey to juggle on demand. The second deliverable is simple as you can hire someone to build a pedestal or you can buy a ready-made one from a store.

Given the relative difference in difficulty between these deliverables, it would be advisable to first tackle the monkey training as completing that will significantly de-risk the venture. And if it becomes apparent after a couple of days of training that this is impossible, you can cut your losses.

Unfortunately, teams will often pick the easier deliverable first. This pushes out the timeframe for tackling the riskiest aspects of the project. Not only does this provide a false sense of progress, but it also increases the effort and costs spent which in turn worsens their ability to ignore sunk costs when deciding whether or not to keep going.

It doesn't matter whether you are using a predictive or adaptive life cycle for your project. Early de-risking is a good way to avoid getting a monkey on your back!

My previous article covered the risks which were realized through my campaign to become a councilor within Welland's city council in the recent municipal elections. This one focuses on the lessons I learned through the project's lifetime.

With the exception of two streets where I had a couple of kind volunteers drop off my campaign flyers, I did all the door-to-door canvassing myself. Next time, I would like to recruit at least a half-dozen volunteers whom I could educate on my platform well in advance of the start of canvassing and divide the ward territory between us. This will help me to be able to visit each and every residence within the ward (as opposed to the roughly one third which I visited this time). It would also provide the ability to visit residences a second time within a week of the election day to remind people to get out and vote.

My lawn signs had a lot of information beyond the mandated minimum requirement of the candidate's name, ward and the role they were running for. I had included my campaign slogan as well as my campaign website URL. While this provided more information to pedestrian readers, the target audience for lawn signs is drivers and hence the excessive information and small typeface I'd used made my signs much less readable. While I'd hope that the city council approves a motion to update the by-laws to ban election lawns before 2026, if they continue to be used, I will stick with the minimum required content and rely on other means to share my campaign slogan and website such as my flyers.

I was too conservative in the number of door hangers (i.e. brochures which can be hung from a door handle or door knob) which I'd initially ordered and later reprinted. It would have been cheaper and more efficient to order enough at the start to cover all residences within the ward.

Finally, while I felt that a diversified advertising approach would work well which included ads and articles in both the local community newspaper as well as a large local online community, I received no data from either of the providers afterwards to assess the effectiveness of these tactics. The money I'd spent could have been used to buy more flyers and door hangers. Next time I will focus on spending my campaign budget on measures which primarily support my door-to-door campaign.

The biggest challenge will be addressing that realized risk of low voter turnout. As an individual candidate, I'm not sure that there's much more which I could do beyond in-person and online education of my fellow residents about the importance of municipal government. An editorial article in today's local newspaper indicated that when a different municipality expended significant effort on educating residents about the importance of municipal government and how easy it is to vote in the local election, their voter turnout decreased!

There are four years to go until the next municipal elections and should I choose to run again, I've learned a number of lessons which should make my campaign more effective.

Those of you who read my articles regularly will know that I took a hiatus from writing about leadership and delivery topics over the past couple of months to focus on my first time campaign running for one of the city councilor seats in Welland. Election day was this past Monday (October 24) and unfortunately, while I received a fair number of votes, it was not enough to unseat one of the two incumbents in my ward.

Back in July, while planning for the campaign, I'd written a series of articles on the approach I'd taken to manage this project. In my final article, I'd covered the delivery and outcome risks I'd identified and addressed and will provide an update on these as well as to share what I learned through the experience.

The delivery risks I'd identified related to increased costs of campaign materials or delays in procuring these materials were never realized as there were multiple providers of signs, flyers and other marketing products. My concern about falling afoul of election or sign bylaws was also not realized as I was careful to follow the rules. Some of the other candidates appeared to violate sign bylaws but I was not aware of their experiencing any consequences for this behavior. The final delivery risk I identified about residents not meeting me when I visited their homes was partially realized. While I did try to schedule my canvassing times for when most residents would be home, I'd estimate that at least 50% of my door knocks went un-answered either because the residents were out or they were "door screening".

I'd identified two outcome risks - one related to a low voter turnout and the second related to an inability to convince residents to vote for me.

Unfortunately, in spite of all candidates (myself included) and city staff heavily promoting the importance of voting in the municipal elections, Welland had the lowest voter turnout (25%) of all municipalities in the Niagara region. The city staff had provided multiple early voting dates, the ability for residents to vote at any of the eight polling stations across the city on election day, and free public transit access for residents who didn't have transportation to get to a polling station. The weather was sunny and warm on election day and polls were open till 8 PM.

No one knows what the root cause was for the low turnout, although an article in our local newspaper did offer that it might due to voter fatigue given that we did have federal and provincial elections within the past year. I'm not convinced that this is THE primary cause but it was likely a contributing factor.

Official voting statistics have not been published for my ward but based on the total number of votes cast for the four councilor candidates and the assumption that the vast majority of voters chose to vote for two candidates, our voting percentage was also just below 25%.

As far as the second risk goes, based on the assumption of most voters picking two councilor candidates, I calculate that just under a third of voters from my ward voted for me. Unfortunately, a larger percentage would have picked one of the other three candidates as their first or second choices. Similarly, if I based voting percentage on the number of residences I visited, it works out to just under a third. While I would have liked to have had more voters pick me, if more residents had voted, I feel my odds of winning would have been improved.

In the final article of this series, I'll share what I learned through my campaign which I could apply should I choose to run in the next municipal election.

After "What certification should I get after the PMP?", the next most common certification-related question I see on LinkedIn and ProjectManagement.com discussion groups is asking how to get ready to write the PMP exam and how much elapsed time should be allowed for this effort.

This question reminds me very much of the fun exercise which I ask learners in my foundational project management course to complete: "How long does it take to catch a fish?". I ask them to think about all the possible variables which could affect their answer (e.g. type of fish, location, time of day, type of bait) as well as whether they consider this to be a fixed duration activity or a fixed effort activity.

In terms of studying for the exam, there are many different methods available including:

• Reading PMI's reference books listed on the PMP certification page
• Using a reputable self-study guide
• Taking one or more quality practice exams
• Attending an on demand PMP preparatory course
• Attending a live (in person or virtual) PMP preparatory course
• Watching a number of PMP prep videos
• Using a PMP exam prep smartphone app

It is usually advisable that a candidate seriously consider using a combination of these as the exam retake cost is high enough that the goal should be to pass on the first attempt.

The candidate will also need to assess how ready they are before implementing one or more of these methods and how much available time they have to commit to preparing. For the former, it is a good idea to take a single quality practice exam (hint: if its free, it probably is not good quality) and use the score on that exam as a baseline. Ideally this practice exam will provide the candidate with their score across the exam domains and tasks so that they know which topics will need greater studying focus.

To answer the second question, once the candidate has completed a readiness assessment and determined how much free time they will have, they can then put together a work-forward schedule to come up with a realistic exam date. As part of this exercise, if they intend to take a preparatory course, they should ensure the course is taken close to when they intend to write the exam, but they should leave themselves a week or two at least after the course to bridge any knowledge gaps they identified by taking the course.

All this to say, the only valid answer to both questions is it depends!

While the phrase "quiet quitting" might have been popularized recently, the behavior has been with us for a long time. For those of us who are Seinfeld fans, you'll remember the many creative ways in which George Costanza would do either no work or the absolute bare minimum to avoid getting fired.

When we are considering operational work, quiet quitting is putting in the least effort to perform the standard responsibilities of one's role such that required performance measurements are met.

But what does this look like for team members working on projects? While there are many ways in which this dysfunction could be expressed, common ones are:

• Refusing to take on any responsibilities outside of our role description
• Reluctance to help other team members when they need our assistance
• Participating in mandatory team events but not in social or discretionary ones
• Being unwilling to take on any activities which could result in the need to work overtime

A recent article in Harvard Business Review asserts what we'd expect. Such behavior is usually not a case of someone being a "slacker" but rather an outcome of poor management.

So what are someone of the things you might be doing which are encouraging your team members to quiet quit? Assuming you aren't acting like a boss from Hell, here are some other things to watch out for:

• Are you recognizing your team members? This recognition doesn't need to be monetary or formal, but without doing it authentically and regularly, their motivation might be ebbing.
• Is their workload manageable? Assuming they are not fully dedicated to your project, have they taken on more work than can be done reasonably? If so, you might want to meet with their functional managers to see if that can be addressed.
• Are they stuck with boring work? Being perpetually assigned the same responsibilities project after project could be a good reason for someone to check out, so you might want to ask them if they are feeling sufficiently challenged with the activities or whether there is something else on the project which they'd be interested in taking on.
• Do they feel safe? If there is a lower level of psychological safety within the team, team members are more likely to stick to just their assigned or selected work and avoid stretching beyond that.

It is also possible that the behavior might be the result of organizational issues or challenges with their functional manager. For example, if they feel that their work is worth more than they are being paid for and they lack the confidence or don't have the ability to seek something different, that could result in disengagement and quiet quitting.

While it would be easy to pass the buck with such concerns, if you are able to get the team member to open up and share what's bothering them, you can decide whether it is worth advocating on their behalf to get the issues resolved. Even if you are unsuccessful in doing so, the fact that you went to bat for them might be enough to get the team member to want to do a better job on your project.

Finally, if you perceive quiet quitting as a silent cry for help, you might discover what is causing the behavior and be able to prevent the team member from escalating to joining the Great Resignation.