Project Managers and the Goldfish Syndrome

There is an analogy that uses the supposed fact that Goldfish have such a limited short-term memory that for them every trip around their bowl is a new experience. Nothing from the previous short trip is remembered. This analogy can be used for certain sectors of the project management profession: where many projects are a trip around the fish bowl.

This doesn’t apply to projects in the construction and manufacturing industries where they are using known methods and technologies. Most skyscrapers and bridges follow known techniques and industry standards are widely accepted. Only when they start using new technologies are the benefits of the familiar reduced. The vast majority of construction projects are finished, not always on time or budget but they are completed. Our cities are not riddled with partially built structures. Only the collapse of the developer’s finances, as in 2008/9, stops the work once it is started.

Not so in the software world where the analogy is very apposite. Many projects are launched on the expectation of fair winds and favorable tides and with shifting requirements. They are always the children of the victory of hope over experience. The result is a computer landscape littered with abandoned projects. The largest consultancy companies all have multiple failed mega projects on their resumes. But does it stop them and their clients from repeating the same mistakes again? No it doesn’t. The UK Health Service has had a number of mega projects aimed at consolidation patient records, all failed with huge amounts of sunk costs written off. In fact the only thing that has improved on these projects is the size of the losses.

No management discipline can consider itself to be professional when, in significant sectors, the Goldfish syndrome afflicts its practitioners.

Old economic paradigms don't die, or fade away; their believers get awards.

In the past few months the Institute of Economic Affairs in the UK announced it's annual award to the person who made great contributions to free enterprise during their working life. The recipient of this honour was Viscount Ridley, the Brits do love a Lord, who's main claim to notoriety in the UK was to be Chairman of The Northern Rock Bank, an institution that had existed since 1850. It started life has a building society and converted to a bank in 1997, following the trend advocated by the IEA and Thatcherite economic theology.

As a bank it adopted the prevailing economic ideology, and then some, and followed a highly risky loan strategy, which included giving borrowers mortgages of up to 125% of their properties value! The end result was that in 2007 it suffered the first run on a British bank in 150 years. It had customers lining up outside it branches demanding their money back! Over a few days they had to pay out $3B. But it wasn't enough and the Bank had to be nationalized at a cost of $40B to the UK taxpayer.

Yet the man who presided over this debacle, the 5th Viscount Ridley, instead of facing any sanctions or censure ends up, seven years later, being given an award for economic achievement! A decision that would beggar's belief in rational world. Lose billions and get an award. The epitome of failing upwards.

So what does this mean in the project management world? We have an entrenched paradigm that is waterfall, and we have contending methods such as Critical Chain (which is a variation of waterfall) and Agile. Like the failed “efficient market” model in conventional economic theory education, waterfall is considered to be mandatory on all project courses, especially for beginners. So any “new or improved” PM model has to overthrow decades of conditioning and also to get the PM establishment to demote waterfall to a subset of models that only deal with well established technologies and methods. As the financial example above indicates getting any establishment to change is difficult even when the evidence of failure is over whelming.

OODA Loop and Six Honest Working men.

The famous British writer Rudyard Kipling wrote that in carrying out his work he used “six honest working men”: Who, What, When, Why, Where, and How. By asking these questions he could write an article for a newspaper, a poem, a story. They were the starting point for his exploration of a subject.

Similarly they should be the foundation for all project managers combating bias and the tendency to believe that “What you see is all there is” (WYSIATI). Forcing yourself to ask these six questions when you reach the Decide portion of the Observe, Orient, Decide, Act (OODA) loop will prevent you from rushing to a premature conclusion because your mind’s system 1 (the reptilian part) overrides your lazy system 2 (the rational analytical part). 

Certainly after every new piece of information you should ask yourself “so what?” What does this piece of information mean? What is its impact on the current situation? What should I do with it? And so on with the other “honest working men”. It doesn’t mean you’ll always come to the right conclusion, but you are certainly more likely to avoid a rushed one. 

Conclusions, WYSIATI, and the OODA loop.

In his book 'Thinking: fast and slow' Daniel Kahneman introduces the concept that our brains have two separate systems, the first one is fast thinking and is what we use to recognize danger and decide whether to fight or flee, the second one is slow and is what we use to analyze complex situations: buying a car or a house. The problem is that system 1, to use Kahneman's terminology, is always on and always making judgments, jumping to conclusions on the merest amount of evidence. It doesn't evaluate the quantity or quality of the evidence, it just takes what it has and comes up with a conclusion. It doesn't search our memory for additional facts that might contradict or even confirm its conclusions. It acts as if 'What you see is all there is,' or WYSIATI. Unless we make a decision to engage system 2 then we are at the mercy of system 1.

This genetic predisposition has profound implications for the Orient phase of the OODA loop. Left unchecked system 1 can open the door to all kinds of filters and biases that will screw up our evaluation of a given situation. Causing us to make poor decisions. We need to discipline ourselves to always question what our first reaction to information is. Ask ourselves is this all the information there is? What is the quality of this data? Are there other facts available to help me to better analyze this situation? It takes time and effort but it is what a master politician or strategist does.