The Blind Optimism of Planning

In the New South Wales Knowledge Management Chat room this week, an interesting topic on project managers emerged. A senior executive had observed project managers coming off projects where they had experienced a variety of major issues, challenges and where turning around for their next assignment with a view that 'it will never happen again' only to find out they have the same or similar experiences on the next project. The senior executive was curious about this phenomena and suggested the project managers operated under a sense of optimism. His project managers believed that things would always get better and that the same concerns they had on the last project could never happen again. The senior executive suggested they needn't be pessimistic, better to be more realistic and he asked what did the network think about his position and what had others experienced.

Having spent the last 30 years working with project managers in theatre and live entertainment, I had also been intrigued by this phenomena and had recently been highly entertained by Black Swans, the Risk of High Improbability by Nassin Nicholas Taleb that deals with the concept of randomness, rare events and the unknown unknownable topics that are the very essence of project manager's lives.

The skill of excellent Project Managers in my experience is their ability to be able to live continually with the rare event, that part of a project which is not normal and that will always occur in every single project regardless of the industry. The really good project managers are those that learn to live and indeed thrive with the knowledge that somewhere along the way they will experience an unknown that will provide major issues and challengers. In my experience as a theatre and event producer/director, in 25 odd years no project has been the same and yet all have had the same frameworks in which I operated. And yes, every time my team went into a project we went in with the same thought. We will not have major issues or challenges. We planned extensively. This is particularly important when you are producing one off television shows, major new plays, children's outdoor events, professional bull riding circuits or on tours with a cast and crew where you have to open the show regardless of the circumstances at 7.30pm sharp every night. And yet in every one of those examples, I can site you a rare event that created tensions and added to the never ending learning experience. I held a team together for 14 years in which we began to see the value of and treasure the rare events. That was what made the work interesting, creative and built a lifelong camaraderie. The challenges and major issues in project management come about because of the unknown, the rare event. And rare events happen all the time in project management. The reason they are considered rare is because they sit outside the plans humans devise and expect to have implemented perfectly. Plans are projections and therefore fiction and should be treated as such. People experience fiction in completely different ways. No-one person experiences fiction the same. It is the same with plans. Until that is generally recognised, there will always be a lack of understanding about why project managers, regardless of their industry, experience tension conflict, ambiguity and the black hole of uncertainty every time they work on new projects. The emphasis with project managers should be on developing their observational and creative problem solving skills; their ability to be able to work in the moment, developing their confidence to walk into those black holes of uncertainty and in trusting their own ability to surface and communicate the knowledge the black hole will inevitably produce. Using this process, project managers learn to work with the emerging future, a tangible concept rather than with some explicit fictional object called a plan that whilst providing a guide for the outcomes of the project usually has no relationship to the reality of it whatsoever either at the beginning, in the middle or in the end. Remember the Sydney Opera House began with a plan and a budget of $7million and ended as a nightmare and unfinished $140 million over budget. Image the tensions, challenges, fights, arguments, sackings and perceived failures that must have occurred to build the place. The Sydney Olympic Games Opening and Closing Ceremonies went some $60million over budget I am led to believe and I know some of those involved have sworn they will never go through the same process again. Yet they have since and they will again. Yet what a magnificent cultural icon the Sydney Opera House is and what a magnificent cultural statement the Olympic Games Opening and Closing ceremonies were? The book that needs to be written is about the fictions, failures and fallacies of planning and those who advocate it as logical hard data! Taleb's book, by the way, has a great glossary, wonderful notes and one of the most extensive bibliographies I have come across.