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. I know, it is becoming some kind of mantra for me, but, yes, it is a shocker for a lot of people, you can't force reality in sticking to your plan. Forget it. It is not going to happen. Ever. Because it seems to be a habit hard to break, a state of mind hard to get rid of, it is worth spending a little closer look into this matter. Why can't we predict project future?

Fifth Discipline

The answer starts with something called "The Fifth Discipline". It sounds like some cult, some hush-hush society that guards a life-changing secret: the 5th Discipline. Although it was life changing for me, it is nothing like that. It is the title of a book by Peter [TAG-Tec]Senge[/TAG-Tec] he wrote in the early 1990s [1]. He put forth the idea of "five disciplines" that have to be considered in improving business and organizations (Personal Mastery, Mental Models, Systems Thinking, Shared vision, and Team learning). Every discipline has its own merits, but for the topic at hand we will focus on one: systems thinking. For Senge an organization is viewed as multiple "systems" (or you may think about processes) that interact with each other. The systems are not viewed as linear, but more as loops that keep on repeating, until some change has been done. To give you an idea, 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, 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 to see for us.

Another example: to increase productivity of a team, new fresh employees are added to the team. However, people need time to learn the ropes within the teams working environment, and with extra members to total communication overhead increases. Within small teams this may not have a large impact on the productivity of the individual team members, but as more and more new members are put to a team, the productivity gain will drop. It will probably plateau at a given moment, or, when teams are getting to large, too much new members are added simultaneously, etc. it may even drop.

Systems Theory

When you talk about it, it feels quite natural. It has a proper "yeah-this-is-how-it-works" touch to it. But mind you, it is quite a mental stretch for most of us. Between the great World Wars of the 20th century scientist Ludwig von Bertalanffy came up with a new way to look at things in physics, biology, economy, psychology, sociology and all other sciences; he formulated the [TAG-Tec]General Systems Theory[/TAG-Tec]. In essence this view on the world consists of recognizing that independent elements make up something larger, something bigger, a unified whole. Although the elements are independent, they are influencing each other, the have a certain relation, they are related. This "whole" with its underlying elements is called "a system".

Although the previous paragraph may throw your mind in a back flip, the concept of systems is quite an intuitive and natural thing; an organization consists of employees all working and communicating together, they make up the elements for the "whole" which in this case is the organization. Flows of air, the movements of water, the impact of sunshine are all the underlying elements that make up our weather system. Every individual buy or sell transaction make up our economy. You see, nothing to be scared here.

At a first glance this systems world view seems like an empty shell. You might wonder what it brings us? How can this help you and me? The answer is nicely formulated again by Senge [1]

"Business and other human endeavors are also systems. They, too, are bound by invisible fabrics of interrelated actions, which often take years to fully play out their effects on each other. Since we are part of that lacework ourselves, it's doubly hard to see the whole pattern of change. Instead, we tend to focus on snapshots of isolated parts of the system, and wonder why our deepest problems never seem to get solved. Systems thinking is a conceptual framework (..) to make full patterns clearer and to help us see how to change them effectively."

Another neat thing about systems is that across the whole spectrum of sciences, systems pop up that look the same or have similar behavior then systems in a different discipline. This allows is to beg-steal-and-borrow theories and models from different areas. Our toolbox to look at our own systems of interest has widely broadened.

Cybernetics

Closely related to the notion of systems is the concept of [TAG-Tec]cybernetics[/TAG-Tec], first formulated by the mathematician Wiener. This concept describes how a system communicates with its environment and based upon the feedback it gets from it, alters its behavior. If a group of animals will drink water from a well and one of the groups dies because of it, they entire group may search for a different well. If a company introduces a new product, and sees its stock plummeting because of it, it might change its strategy. The feedback mechanism comes in all sorts and shapes; they are the focus of cybernetics. The additional value this brings should be obvious; a system always lives within a context (a project within a larger organization for example) and this idea of communication/feedback provides us with an angle on how to look at this phenomena.

And new angles are precisely what we need to counter our idea of reality-following-the-plan. It is all a matter of changing our mindset. Doug DeCarlo almost dedicated half of his book Extreme Project Management [2] to convince us of this fact. In his opinion traditional managers hold a Newtonian view of the world, in the sense that events are linear, cause-and-effect can be nicely summed up in beautiful laws. In todays world of dynamic complexity that model of the universe in your mind is not going to cut it for you: what you need is a quantum mindset. Exactly the kind of world view I am talking about!

If you are convinced that you cannot predict the future, your control loop becomes completely different. Traditional the thermostat model is used: reality is measured and compared against the plan. If reality is different than the plan, all effort is put into creating such a process that reality is in line with the plan again. If salespeople are not meeting their targets, they dont get the bonus. This kind of carrot-stick management creates all kinds of unwanted behaviour. Like people that are reporting what they are supposed the report to confirm the plan, regardless the actual real situation. Everything to avoid the stick.

When you have a quantum mindset, you know that reality cannot be planned. The thermostat model is therefore a ridiculous way of managing. More natural is the adoption of the scientific model: your forecast of the future is your expectation. If your forecasts are not in line with reality, your assumptions on which you based your expectations on, are not correct. You need to alter your mental model and try to come up with better forecasts.

[1] Senge, Peter, 5th Discipline
[2] DeCarlo, Doug, Extreme Project Management