Project management as an organisational capability · Part III · Chapter 8 of 11
The three most common mistakes
Anyone who wants to bring order to handling the new almost always stumbles over the same three stones.
1. Reaching for the tool first
The most common mistake is to start with area of clarification 7. A new tool is supposed to create the order that never emerged at the levels before it. Then the technology is not the problem, but the unclarified basis beneath it. What moves into a system in disorder is afterwards in disorder in a system.
2. Handing over the clarification entirely
The second mistake is to leave the entire clarification to an outsider or to a new position, in the hope that someone else will lay down the fundamentals for management. In failed undertakings a recurring pattern emerges: leadership, stakeholders and risks are not addressed at the outset, top management takes too little initiative, and too much burden rests on the shoulders of employees. Much of the preparation can be delegated, but the decisions that depend on leadership responsibility cannot be made by anyone from outside.
3. Starting and getting stuck
The third mistake is the quietest. People clarify the upper, pleasantly strategic areas and stop where it becomes uncomfortable, at decision rights and ingrained habits. Change initiatives can stall or miss their goals. The reasons can include organisational, communication-related and leadership-related factors; no single cause that applies to all undertakings can be identified. The pattern at issue here is a specific one: what remains is a clear intention whose implementation fails because of the unclarified areas that follow.
It is worth looking more closely at why it stops precisely there. The upper areas cost reflection. The following ones cost something else, namely influence. Whoever defines decision rights redistributes them. Whoever orders ingrained habits puts into words what previously applied unspoken. That is not a problem of good will but a predictable reaction, and it occurs in well-run organisations just as much as elsewhere.
Added to this is something that happens daily in the meeting room and is rarely named. In the debate about an undertaking, it is not always the best proposal that prevails, but often the best presented one. Whoever masters the art of being right wins against the one who is right but argues less well. That is why a visible decision path alone is not enough. Visibility helps where an organisation can tolerate contradiction. Where it cannot, the visible path is simply played better.
This names the most important precondition, and it is at the same time the clearest limit of this publication. The ability to handle conflict is a precondition, nothing a method can create. Clarification can create the place where assumptions and decisions become visible. Whether an organisation can then bear what it sees is for it to decide.
What you can take away from this is not a diagnosis of your organisation but a new lens. Next time, pay attention to who puts which figure on the table when, and how confidently it is presented. Afterwards you will see more than before. Nothing more is needed at this point.
Source of thought, not evidence: Daniel Kahneman, Jim CollinsSources of thought →
Early clarification is usually the most favourable point
Behind this stands a simple economics that supports the idea of this publication. Clarification at the very beginning, when you define what an undertaking is meant to achieve at all, is, as a rule, the most favourable point in time. A mistake recognised at that stage can usually be corrected with far less effort than in the middle of implementation.
That early clarification nevertheless does not happen also has to do with a well-studied error of thinking. Daniel Kahneman describes it as the inside view versus the outside view. Anyone estimating the effort of an undertaking looks at their own team and their own plan and arrives at a figure that is regularly far too low. Only looking at comparable undertakings by others corrects it. Reference class forecasting builds on this insight: it adjusts one's own estimate using the actual course of comparable undertakings.
Source of thought, not evidence: Daniel KahnemanSources of thought →
In the reference model from Chapter 10, this is exactly where the impulse phase with its decision points comes in. It helps to make early clarification a conscious step before an idea becomes a binding undertaking. The idea is not to make every project heavier, but to ask the right questions early enough, while course corrections are still cheap.
What has been clarified must be recorded. That is the subject of the next chapter.