Culture is a powerful force in any human system. It establishes the norms of behavior and acts as a reference point for the expectations we have of each other and ourselves. While we are all used to the idea of culture in our public societies (cultures driven by national identity, religious affiliation, generational groups and /or fashion), culture in the workplace gets less attention. While the phase "corporate culture" is banded around, few organizations really have a grasp of what it is, how ...
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Leadership
Strategic Misrepresentation
As a timely follow up to the excellent set of posts about cognitive biases written by guest writer Paul Gibbons, the UK's National Audit Office (NAO) has just published a report that illustrates how the “optimism bias” and other dysfunctions can distort key investment decisions.
The decision to proceed with a project and decisions about how to approach it, are some of the most challenging needing to be made. These decisions are among the first to be made and occur at a point in time at which ...
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Cognitive biases and leading change – Part 3
In parts 1 and 2 of this series we have looked at the affect cognitive bias have on our view of the past and the present. In this third and final part we'll be looking at how such biases effect our view of the future.
Physicist Niels Bohr (a contemporary and collaborator of Einstein) said “prediction is difficult, especially about the future”. If humans are biased in our views of the past and present, our views of the future are even more fraught. We are caught between the Scylla of ho...
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Cognitive biases and leading change – Part 2
Last week we described the sunk cost and the ostrich biases and how they distorted the way change decision makers view the past. Other biases affect our view of the present. These present-based biases can be further split into problem definition, and solution finding.
Problems in problem definition
“If I had only one hour to save the world, I would spend fifty-five minutes defining the problem, and only five minutes finding the solution.” (Einstein)
The way problems are stated is called th...
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Cognitive biases and leading change – Part 1
Humans make big thinking mistakes in predictable ways. Collectively these errors are called ‘cognitive biases’. Business leaders sometimes make billion dollar decisions, and neither their businesses nor wider society can afford ‘hardware glitches’ on that scale. This three-part series on cognitive biases and leadership starts with how cognitive biases systematically distort our view of the past and how that affects today’s decisions.
In 2001, I was called into British Airways because they...
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Shifting the status quo
In Project Management circles there is an increasing awareness that some projects aren't just about producing deliverables, they are about delivering "change". Project's in today's business world are often changing the way business is done and the failure to recognize how hard it can be to change work habits, or organizational structures, is one of the contributing factors seen in a number of the projects in the "Catalogue of Catastrophe".
Many of the better Project Management courses in the m...
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What is Project Success?
"As Project Manager, juggling all of the balls is important, but keeping your eye on the right ball is the key to delivering truly successful projects" - RG
While understanding the causes of project failure is important, without a common definition of "success", there is no clear basis for differentiating a success from a failure. Clearly none of the projects in the Catalogue of Catastrophe can be regarded as great successes (some resulted in bankruptcies, many were cancelled before completio...
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The Bean Counter’s Blind Spot
Lesson learned: Be careful what you measure and how you measure it.
Category: Project objectives / Decision making.
The following post is a “Lesson Learned” that comes from the analysis of the failed projects documented in the “Catalogue of Catastrophe” or from the experiences the editorial team have had working with clients around the world. The post is published here to spark discussion and help individuals and organizations think about what it takes to improve project success rates.
I can...
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And now – A Message TO our Sponsors
The Sponsorship role is perhaps the most important in a project. The Sponsor owns the project and has a direct responsibility for ensuring that the desired business outcomes are achieved. In discussing project failures with people, one of the common complaints I hear is that the Sponsorship role is either non-existent or weak in their organizations. Ownership of projects is often unclear and no one really champions the project within the organization. Project Managers are left holding the baby a...
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Project Initiation – The Kick-Off Canvas
The decisions made during project initiation are among the most critical in a project. They set the direction for the project, establish the project's objectives and establish how the project is to be approached. Mistakes made at this early stage can be fatal. Sadly all too many projects do go wrong at this early stage and once a project has set out on the wrong path it can be difficult to rectify the situation without taking a significant write-down on the efforts and costs made up to that poin...
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