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Why Reality Will Not Stick To Your Plan

by Ali Anani and Bas de Baar

Project life can be quite frustrating when one day after another turns out not how you planned it. The software should be ready when you said it would. It has to. Otherwise you have people waiting, customers complaining and bosses getting annoyed. It is your reputation and ultimately your job on the line. If you just plan harder, more detailed, than the plan must be correct. Right? Of course not. It is a shock for a lot of people, but you cant force reality in sticking to your plan. Forget it. It is not going to happen. Ever. Looking at management practices in general around corporations around the globe, it seems to be a habit hard to break, a state of mind hard to get rid of.

Having a false mental model of how it all works “ projects, management, people, reality “ has disastrous results. IT Projects have a high failure rate with poor estimating, planning and Project Management as one of the main reasons why. If you think you can predict the future, if you think you can plot the path reality has to take, but in fact you cant, you have the source of the high failure rate of projects.

The entire world is brought up with a management mantra of plan-plan-plan!, therefor it is difficult to change your view on this subject. To help you make the switch, to assist you in going to the other side, we have developed the The Fish Pond Metaphor for Management. We are going to dive into a real fish pond, see how it operates to learn valuable lessons about managing projects.

This first posting in our series about Complexity of Management should tickle your imagination. We aim to make you aware of the reasons why we cant predict the future. Our next articles will be explaining the need for the new metaphor and the details and reasoning behind the Fish Pond.

Best practices become worst practices under changing environments

We opt to go for the fish pond as a metaphor for the new world. Fishes, which live in vast spaces such as oceans, seas and rivers, have been transferred to live in fish ponds or farms. This situation emulates the collapse of the world into a global village. Imagine a piece of pacific ocean: the fish, the water, the vegetation, the currents, the depth, the enormous width of it all. And now imagine you put four glass walls side by side in the ocean, to isolate a small column from surface to bottom. You didn’t change the population of fish, you didn’t change the water or depth, you merely made its size smaller. From all the possibilities that could change, you just changed one thing. What happens?

Obviously, the fish will have less room to swim in. The fish in an ocean or sea has enough space to swim and move. This movement is restricted in a limited space and may not give fish enough space to go a full distance before turning around. A very interesting research is that reported by Debby Turner. This research aimed at correlating the behavior of fish with that of people. The fish were confined to a large tank. The researcher observed that the fish used the whole area of the tank in their swimming. When a glass partition halved the tank into two compartments the fish still tried to swim the whole area of the tank.

The fish banged their heads in the process. After a while the fish adapted to swim up to the glass partition and turned around before making contacts with it. The researcher removed the glass partition afterwards and watched the swimming behavior of the fish for months. None of the fish made an attempt to swim the whole tank for fear of colliding against an imaginary barrier. Fear paralyzed the fish from discovering new frontiers. This is not different from bees when you put them in a transparent bottle. If we lay the bottle horizontally on a table and place a light source to the bottom of the plastic bottle the bees will move towards the light source and stay near the bottom of the bottle when they could escape their prison by moving towards the open mouth of the bottle.

Practices perceived as best practices become worst practices under changing environments. Assumptions on how things work under certain conditions can have an entire new meaning when other conditions are valid. We base our view of tomorrow on assumptions that may be utterly wrong.

Complexity In The Eco-system

It is not just the behavior of the fishes that under go changes by one change in the environment. Physical processes that regulate an eco-system can get a direct hit from the reduction of pond size. Those organisms which live in the water of a fish pond and have chlorophyll, produce carbohydrates from the carbon dioxide and the water in the process of photosynthesis by utilization of solar energy, while oxygen is produced as a by-product of the process. In deeper water ponds the biggest part of the oxygen produced comes from the phytoplankton, but in shallow ponds the macro vegetation, the algae and the benthic algae have a dominating role. Among the factors influencing production of fish ponds water temperature and illumination are the most important.

The pond depth influences the role of algae: the deeper the pond is, the less role algae have. Algae are just a single-cell plant that grows like crazy when properly nourished with sunlight, nitrogenous waste and water. Here is the dilemma: fish releases ammonia, which is converted to nitrate. Nitrate help algae grow, and fish feeds on algae. But the rapid growth of algae deprives the fish from oxygen. Here is the dilemma: fish produce byproducts that eventually lead to their killing! In a pond the build up of the nitrate is problematic, but in a sea it is not. The shallower the pond, the more acute the problem is. Here the algae come to play the role of savers!! Algae consume the nitrate and rapidly populate the pond and might easily get out of control. They blossom and compete with the fish for oxygen!

If the Fish Pond is going to fast for you, consider the following example: A car repair shop has not much to do. So if a client comes with his car, he can be helped immediately. After a while worth of mouth about the speed of service, provides this repair shop with an increasing number of clients. As the number of clients grows, the waiting time for service also increases. When the service time takes to long, clients go away. Having fewer clients, again, the speed of service is up again.

In this short example, and the Fish Pond, our main problem with reality becomes clear. It is called dynamic complexity. In our normal line of thinking, we think about an event A that happens, and that causes something else, say B. The occurrence of B might trigger some event C. A nice linear cause-and-effect chain. With dynamic complexity this is exactly what is not taking place: cause and effect are not close in space and time, and therefor, very difficult for us to see. Basically, reality is too complex for us to comprehend. And just for your information, in a real fish pond dozens of these processes are taking place all at the same time.

Fish Pond And Projects

So far we have talked about confused fish and a poisoned eco-system. It explains why it would be very difficult to describe what happens when you isolate a small part of the pacific. The Fish Pond metaphor provides an easy link to people working in projects.

People are not different from fish. Fear of punishment and change and forcing strict rules on their peoples actions so that they may not deviate from best practices confine people to limited spaces. This is contrasting with self-organizing behavior when space limitations the repeated folding and stretching of the space lead to utilizing the available space efficiently and in an organized manner. Living systems remove barriers and find a way to deal with them. Best management practices are great in certain environments and are real barriers to growth and self-organizing in other environments. The limitation of space in a pond requires new forms of management that allow for exploration and remove the barriers of fear.

And regarding the algae and the oxygen, here is the analogy with toxic employees! They offer you help to ease your life or the teams life, but only for a short while. Once they grow and populate your organization they poison your life. These employees suffocate the good ones and force them out. They spread more and their poison spreads more. This is a vicious cycle that is not encountered in large waters or very deep waters. They consume more oxygen at night! They know when to attack!

With this initial posting we hope to fire up your brain and imagination to start looking differently at projects. In the next couple of postings we will explore the Fish Pond metaphor more in depth.

Ali Anani got his PhD in chemistry in the UK (1972). As of 1981 Dr. Anani got interested in applying scientific approaches to economic and social issues.

Bas De Baar works as a Project Manager for over a decade. Since 2001, he has been the editor of www.SoftwareProjects.org, a popular website dedicated to Software Project Management.