It might not come as a surprise for you, after all those articles that I wrote about this subject, but if in a project I have to follow a procedure just-because-the-company-says-so we have a serious problem. I can try to comply, and I may even pull it of for a couple of days. But there comes a point where I cannot hold back, and start ignoring the procedure and will do my own thing. True story: on a project where I was one of several PMs, weekly progress reports had to be written and send to all other Project Managers. After a while I got the impression that no one was actually reading these things, because of the kind of questions I was getting (answers were all in the reports).

As I was not fond of reporting just for the sake of reporting anyway, I started little irritating experiments like issuing identical reports with different dates, adding nonsense risks, just to see if anyone was paying attention. As you might have guessed, no responses what so ever. So, I stopped writing the reports. All hell broke loose. You have to write the reports. It says so in our Project Management Handbook. After a while, still not issuing that particular report, I was getting a name about never writing any reports, or structured information what so ever. Although this wasnt true at the moment (I was writing enough documents and sending enough information about relevant issues), in retrospect, after a longer period this started to be true. When hearing my refusal enough times, I actually started behaving that way: I was really starting to not share information. Was a long time ago and I am cured, but it made me wonder.

What I was experiencing is called deviant behavior, not performing the behavior that is considered normal within society or a particular social group. Although the ideas originate from criminology, the concepts also apply to other smaller pieces of society, like projects. The overall idea is that a social groups has its own perception of the ideal life. There is a general conception of how things should be done, what the right way is to operate as a member in that particular group. Get an education. Get a job. Get married. Get a kid. Get another kid. For a large part of society this is still considered the Golden Formula of living ones life. Conflicts can occur on two levels: the goals that the group prescribes, and the means to reach those goals. In a society where be all you can be is the goal, the accepted means are get an education and earn a lot of money. If an individual is not fortunate enough to get an education due to economic circumstances, he still might go for the goal, but can substitute the means by robbing everyone blind.

If someone is tired of the same old goals of society, has the opinion that it only creates mindless power-driven individuals, he has also a deviance with what is regarded as normal. However, still trapped in the traditional meansof society he might still go on in the education-job-marriage-kid path. Typically one of the silent types.

If within a social group the emphasize is put on some one being different in their behavior, not following the norm of the society, this individual can be labeled as deviant. This labeling can be done in the form of drastic measures as putting in jail (which within my society is not a strange thing to do if someone is robbing everyone blind) or by means of communication with a group (did I say gossip?). Deviance within a group can lead to being labeled as such by the group. This labeling in itself would not be so bad, weren't it for the fact that it can lead to a self-fulfilling prophecy. Individuals being labeled as different can look at themselves in the same way and emphasize their label. In this way it becomes a reinforcing process. In the context of crime, by putting people in jail society emphasizes that they perform non-acceptable behavior and that they are bad persons. By being in jail the individual gets a self-image of being a bad person and keeps on behaving like one. If you put it like that, you just know this will trigger a lot of discussions.

Back to the topic of Project Management, there are project goals to fulfill and the project team gets means to its disposable to get reach those goals. But those means are not only just the money and people allocated to the project, but also the approach that is considered normal by the company or the profession group (think about the discussion between plan-driven and agile approaches). What this view teaches us is that if a team member is not following the normal path, look at its perception and attitude of the project goals and the means to reach those goals; chances are that there is something completely out of sync. And emphasizing this point (labeling) will only make matters worse.