Silence is deadly (for projects and teams)

If you've been around projects long enough you know the drill... There are real problems being encountered but everyone above you seems to either be unaware or uninterested in grappling with them.

Denial is a powerful defense mechanism but rarely an effective project management strategy.
Eventually there's a project crisis. Rinse and repeat.

Since we regularly help organizations deal with issues related to these, I was pleased to read some recent results from research performed by VitalSmarts and The Concours Group. They surveyed more than 1,000 executives and project management professionals across 40 companies in a wide variety of industries.

Their Silence Fails study found direct correlations between our willingness and ability to speak up about issues and how successfully we deliver projects. The five most lethal issues that don't get discussed are:

• Fact-free planning. Failure is nearly predestined through insufficient acceptance of reality when it comes to timeframes and resources. The problem isn't that the limitations exist. The problem is people won't discuss the reality.
• Absent without leave (AWOL) sponsors. What happens when the sponsor doesn't lead? Can we talk about that? If not, prepare for failure.
• Skirting. When people skirt around the predefined process, we're often left with the resulting scope creep. If we can't discuss how this impacts projects, we'll likely soon be discussing why the project failed.
• Project chicken. We know we're late but we also know another team is late so we don't speak up. It's a deadly game that happens way too often. And the result? It's not pretty.
• Team failures. Just because we put people on a team together doesn't make them a team. Do we perpetuate the dysfunction by pretending everything's fine or do we intentionally work to improve the team dynamics. The answer can significantly impact a project's success.

Does your team or organization struggle with these issues? Contact us today about our Lipstick on a Pig: How Illusion Leads to Crisis in Real World Projects keynote. It's perfect for a company meeting, offsite, or retreat.

We discuss these dynamics in more detail, including practical ideas about how to break out of the rut of failure caused by illusion. Contact us today for more information.

Labels: crisis, denial, Lipstick on a Pig, planning, project management, project sponsors, risk management, teams

posted by Andy at 12:17 PM  

Oversimplifying the issue

“Idealism increases in direct proportion to one's distance from the problem.”
John Galsworthy, English novelist and playwright

A customer recently shared this quote with me based on a topic we had covered prior to a break. I had to share it with you… Have you seen Galsworthy’s wisdom in action?

We are a culture that loves the sound bite. Wrap the concept up in a 10 second blip… that’ll do just fine. From a cultural standpoint, think about how we oversimplify issues. For example, you’re either a liberal or a conservative. You’re either for saving the lives of millions of people through embryonic stem cell research or you’re a religious whacko. It would appear there’s no middle ground or shades of grey.

In business, think of how many times training classes or articles state we need to “do the right thing”, “put the right people on it”, “ask the right questions”. A recent article recommended that prospective leaders make sure they “do the right thing at the right time”. Uh, thanks for the insight.

At 30,000 feet, everything looks pretty simple. As Galsworthy states, “Idealism increases in direct proportion to one’s distance from the problem.”

Think about projects that, once you dig into the requirements, are not as simple as they might have seemed on the white board with the sales & marketing folks. How about an employee who is struggling with his performance but has some real world challenges going on in his personal life? Or maybe you can think of processes that are a good idea but require changes to the culture to allow for acceptance?

Start digging into issues a little deeper and we’ll often find there’s less black and white and more shades of grey. It becomes more apparent that answers aren’t quite as easy as we may have thought.

For example, the whole stem cell debate has caught my interest. Did you know that while the politcally active mud wrestle about funding of stem cell research, adult stem cells are being used to treat over 67 diseases... today? And there’s promising research (here’s one example) that may make embryonic stem cell usage irrelevant some day.

In business, the reality is some things are black-and-white. There are generally accepted accounting principles that need to be followed. It’s not all shades of grey. Also, we need to simplify at times. In fact, I’ve found many an aspiring leader who failed to influence a situation because they presented too much detail to their executives. They should have provided more headline, less encyclopedia.

We can often win when we do a good job of simplifying.

But oversimplifying can be deadly. This blog entry is a call for you to be wary of oversimplifying.

Suggestions:

• Spend some time in the mud. If you are not spending enough time managing by wandering around, your idealism might be unfounded.


• Check yourself to see if you too often speak with the “right ______” phrasing. If you catch yourself saying, “We need to do this the right way” or “use the right tools”, let that be an alert that your altitude may be causing you to not appreciate the reality of the situation. Is it really a matter of right and wrong? It might be! But often it’s a matter of trade-offs.


• Surround yourself with people who will tell you the truth. You need people around you who will tell you the truth, not just defer. Though it can drive me crazy at times, I purposely develop relationships with people who look at the world differently from me to make sure we’re not all sharing the same Kool-Aid.

Labels: culture, idealism, illusion, planning, project management, reality, requirements

posted by Andy at 3:18 PM