Projects Are About Humans. We Help You Deal With That.

I love looking at situations through different glasses to get several perceptions. I love reading and thinking about human behavior. And I adore authors that take on a multidisciplinary approach. So I must be ecstatic when all three are combined. I am.

In Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads to Another Philip Ball explains to us what happens if you try to explain human behavior by using concepts and theories from physics. It is a treat. Ball writes clear and entertaining, and the ideas behind such a “physics of society” make your head spin. Not necessarily because you are staring at the ultimate truth, but just because you have never looked at your own behavior like that.

Physics cannot tell you how a certain individual particle is going to behave. However scientist can explain how a large group of particles, like a liquid, is going to act. Using this principle on humans you have to focus on collective behavior. The advantage is collective behavior smooths out individual unpredictability. Ball keeps emphasizing throughout the book: “the interdependence of people makes group behavior different from simple extrapolation of individual behavior”. He keeps hammering on the fact the global phenomena are caused by local actors. A large group of individuals interacting make up the “behavior” of the group and not some other way round.

The book explains a lot about the interactions of individuals. I want to highlight one in particular and apply it to the area of Project Management. Facing a certain situation, a person has to select a strategy to interact with another individual. Are you going to cooperate, or are you going to be egoistic? How does this strategy selection work?

How a strategy is exactly chosen, remains a little mystery. Some light can be provided though using Game Theory as treated in the book. In this part of mathematics probability is used to evaluate certain plays. A popular example in this context is that of Prisoners Dilemma. In this posting I will use my own version of this game, the Project Managers Dilemma.

There are two Project Managers and both of them need a certain programmer from a shared pool of resources. They have both two options:

• Share the resource, so they have them both for half the time or


• Claim the resource 100% exclusively for their own project.

In this particular game, if both Project Managers claim the developer, they loose both, as no one will get the programmer (each PM will only get 1 point, as the resource is still available). If they both share the resource, they will earn each a three point reward. If PM 1 claims, and PM 2 goes for option share, PM 1 gets the resource, and is rewarded 5 points, and PM 2 gets nothing and the sucker bonus of 0 points.

Of course, the goal of the game is to get as many points as you can. One round of this game is no fun, and will tell us not much. But playing multiple times this game is more interesting. Based upon previous outcomes the Project Manager can adapt its strategy. Computer simulations have shown (Ball, 2004) that one of the most successful strategies is called Tit-For-Tat. The first round the PM will share (to show he is willing to play nice). And after that, he will always use the strategy that his opponent chose in the previous round. In this way, if the other PM will keep on claiming, he will not be the sucker all the time. And if the other player wants to cooperate by sharing, the PM will go along, as that strategy is seem to be best for both of them.