To lead and to follow

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A mark of effective leadership is recognizing that following advice, sometimes tactically off the main beam of your strategy, is not a weakness of leadership but rather an indicator of personal security and  strong character. 

About a leader somewhat infamous for stubbornness it was said:

Once again [our leader] had demonstrated his uncommon ability both to lead and to follow, to stand firm and to give way. This was the hallmark of his early years [of professional development] in the teeth of expectations that he would be professorially rigid and dogmatic. He made a point of treating [sponsors] with respect, as partners in a common cause

James MacGregor Burns

Over managing; under leading:

Sometimes confusion arises when leaders take the advice of managers -- the people who know how to get things done. Has leadership been submerged and management become dominate? Needless to say -- but I'll say it anyway -- management is focused on measurable results, metrics of performance, and predictability-reliability. 

We don't usually put a lot of measurable metrics around leadership. We know it when we see it: vision, inspiration, motivation, innovation. When present, these attributes drive business and organization success, and that is measurable. 

But when a leader loses their way, or has a mind-blank of vision, regression to management is often where they go. And you'll know it when you see it: an unusual, or even inappropriate, focus on management metrics.  In such situations your project is "management rich" and "leadership poor". 

What to do about it?

Task 1: Speak truth to power. Point out the slip, perhaps inadvertent, from leadership to management.
Task 2: Make leadership demands that will push your inadvertent manager back into the right sandbox.

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How much knowledge?

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Got knowledge?

"If a little knowledge is dangerous, where is the man who has so much as to be out of danger?"

Thomas Huxley,
"On Elementary Instruction in Physiology", 1877

 

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Gambling for resurrection

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Your project is in trouble.

You've spent all the money and have little to show for it.

There's a decision to be made: Shut it down, or take a gamble on resurrection?

A gamble on resurrection is a financial theory about risk taking that posits taking on more risk or leverage in a hope that circumstances -- mostly beyond your control -- will turn favorably and bail you out. (When visiting casinos, I remind myself that the glitz and glamour was all paid for by losers; so there must be a lot of them, and they must lose a lot of money). 

A gamble on resurrection is also a management theory that posits inventing or prioritizing an unrelated event in order to divert attention from the problem at hand. (so called "wag the dog" tactic)

Leaving aside any management diversions -- which risk reputation and integrity-- the economic practices at a decision point about shutting down, or not, modify the gamble in these ways:

Sunk cost rule:

The usual PM rule invoked at this decision point is to ignore sunk cost because you can't do anything about it. Focus only on the future. Is there a viable plan or not? If not, shut it down. 

Moral hazard rule:

If the decision is to shut down, that can't be made without consequences of accountability, else there is a moral hazard created that failure has no cost. 

Of course, the degree of moral hazard is a function of whether or not the project was planned as a high-risk adventure with an anticipated high rate of failure. Such is the essence of the "fail fast; fail often" theory that drives extreme risk takers.

Deleverage rule:

When developing a go-forward resurrection plan, rather shutting it down, the usual planning doctrine is to actually take less risk than the risk that got you here. In other words, you "deleverage" the risk-to-reward ratio and plan more conservatively.

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Threats and Risk: an introduction

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Daniel Miessler has an interesting essay about threats, vulnerabilities, and risks that is worth a quick read.

He summarizes this way:

•  A Threat is a negative scenario you want to avoid
• A Threat Actor is the agent that makes a Threat happen
  
  
• A Vulnerability is a weakness that can be exploited in order to attack you
• A Risk is a negative scenario you want to avoid, combined with its probability and its impact
  
  
• The difference between a Threat and a Risk is that a Threat is a negative event by itself, where a Risk is the negative event combined with its probability and its impact

All good, but then what do you do about any one of them?

Begin with knowledge acquisition.

Any threat, risk, or vulnerability that is susceptible to reduction by knowing more about it is probably worth the investment to gather the available information, or conduct experiments, models, or simulations to put data into an analysis process 

Such activity is applying the skills and processes of epistemology which is the theory of knowledge, especially with regard to its methods, validity, and scope. 

Most important for project management, "epistemology is the investigation of what distinguishes justified belief from opinion." (Oxford online dictionary)

And, to carry it a bit further, such risks, threats, and vulnerabilities are often called epistemic risks, etc.

Truly random effects

If your knowledge study convinces you that more knowledge won't improve the mitigation, then you are in the realm of random effects which are largely unpredictable -- that is, random -- within certain boundaries. 

There are two major categories of such randomness that project managers deal with:

1. The central tendency type of randomness wherein random effects tend to cluster around a central figure, and outliers fall off and away from the central figure. This leads to the so-called "bell curve" which is usually not a perfect bell, but nonetheless the centrality is evident in the data
   
   
2. The "power law" type of randomness wherein random effects are "one-sided" and fall off roughly as the square of the distance from the main lobe. The Pareto histogram is a familiar example, as is the "80-20" histogram.

The best way to identify which of these two phenomenon -- central clustering or power law -- is your situation is by experimentation, observation, simulation, and modelling to develop data and thereby determine the "fit".

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U.S. Gov Research in the public domain

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You hear a lot about theft of intellectual property, aka IP. Well, a lot of IP in the U.S. government domain is freely available:

Since at least 2013, there's been a push from the President's Office of Science and Technology Policy to make as much as possible of government sponsored research available to the public for free.

On August 25th, 2022, this policy initiative of access to government research got another push when OSTP published more detailed and aggressive guidance to the executive departments.

What was behind pay walls and other barriers may now be in the free public domain. 

Your project might benefit.

Check it out.

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Are you in the groove, or a rut?

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Are you "in the groove", making good time and product, or are you in a rut?
How to tell?

• A rut is about 6" deeper than a groove
• It's easy to see over to the next groove -- it may be better -- and you can change grooves if you need to
• In a rut, you often can't see out for other opportunities
• A rut sometimes just gets deeper the more you're doing

Alex Walton, 3PM

In a rut, the first rule of holes often applies: just stop digging!

Beyond platitudes:
Most people would prefer not to be in a rut; it's not stimulating and rewarding

• Like never before, self-help is the first step out. And the internet is the primo source of self-help.
• Summoning the courage to take a risk is probably step two. Even if you're just moving into a groove in familiar space, that sometimes requires some risk-taking
• Asking others for an evaluation of your profile is an important risk step. Park your ego and your pride long enough to take in the data and process it.
• You may have to outright quit and start over, maybe even entry level. Or, if you're entrepreneurial (and everyone isn't), you can start your own 

But the most important thing is to overcome inertia and "do something". If it doesn't work, try again. Ruts are not permanent.

Layoffs? I've got a project to run

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Well, talk about cratering a schedule and resource plan!

Layoffs in the middle of a project will do it for you.

But wait!

There may be a silver lining here:

• Communication complexity in and among project participants decreases as the square of participants. That could be a winner
  
  
• You may be able to select the departees. That's tough in any circumstance, but it's also an opportunity to prune the lesser performers.
  
  
• Some say that if you want to speed up a project, especially software, reduce the number of people involved (the corollary is more often cited: adding people to a team may actually slow it down)
  
  
• There's an opportunity to rebaseline: All the variances-to-date are collected and stored with the expiring baseline. A new plan according to the new resource availability becomes a new baseline. Unfavorable circumstances can perhaps be sidestepped.

Of course, there are downsides:

• If your customer is external, they may not relent on any requirements. You're stuck trying to make five pounds fit in a three pound bag.
  
  
• There may be penalties written in your project contract if you miss a milestone, or overrun a budget. That just adds to the fiscal pain that probably was the triggering factor for layoffs.

Did you see this layoff thing coming?

• On the project balance sheet, you are the risk manager at the end of the day. So, suck it up!
  
  
• And there's the anti-fragile thing: build in redundancy, schedule and budget buffers, and outright alternatives from the git-go. And, if you didn't do those things in the first baseline, you've got a second bite at the apple with the recovery baseline.

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On being accountable

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Are you accountable?

Most of us want to answer 'yes, of course!'; how could it be otherwise? 

Most of us would endorse these ideas:

I'm always accountable for what I do. 

I'm accountable for that which I am responsible.

(Subtext: this can only be true if my personal integrity does not allow me to push blame on to others for failures and missteps, or claim false credit for what others actually did)

Accountability attaches credit and blame.

In popular culture, it seems to be more about attaching blame: A common refrain: "Who's to be held accountable for this!?"

Actually, being accountable means accepting blame or consequences when valid, but also stepping up and accepting accolades when earned.

I like this from Henry Evans, the author of Winning with Accountability, who says accountability is “clear commitments that in the eyes of others have been kept.”

Evans has set the frame: the final judgment about accountability is with others. 

In this sense, the concept of personal accountability is somewhat of an "earned value" idea: 

• You have a 'planned' set of responsibilities to get things done.
• You 'earn' accolades or consequences as you account for your actions
• Others judge the earnings and apply the credit or debit

Thus, in all schemes of accountability, you have a part to play: It's on you to commit to your responsibilities. So, even though Evans' statement is not explicit about being responsible, the holistic idea of accountability stemming from commitment embraces responsibility.

But what I don't like about Evans' statement is that it could be interpreted as requiring 'achievement' (in the sense of a commitment kept) when, of course successful achievement is not a requirement for accountability. Only a commitment to execute responsibly is.

And so in the context I've laid out it's common to encounter these questions:

• What is accountability, or what is it to be accountable?
• Can there be accountability without responsibility?
• Can there be responsibility without accountability?
• Are you given accountability, or do you grab it and take it on?
• Is the apex of the pyramid always accountable for anything down in the pyramid? (See: Captain of the ship is accountable ..... )

I don't want to dig too much more deeply into the psychology of 'accountability', and realistically that would be a fools' errand because project and business culture drive a lot of the answers to the questions above.

So, without making a big thing out of the answers, I'll offer my thinking here:

• As Evans puts it, accountability is about taking personal responsibility for outcomes: "I got this!" "I'm the one you can count on to get it done" "I will be there to see it through". All statements of commitment.
  And with Tom Petty in mind: "I won't back down!".
  
  
• The accountability/responsibility questions are ageless; they've been around since forever! The usual answer is: 'If you want me to be accountable for outcomes, then give me the responsibility for plans and resources. If you crater my plan and matrix out my resources, then you're accountable and not me!
  
  
• If you're not the apex (most senior executive) of the pyramid, you might be 'assigned' accountability: 'This is your mission and no one else's;  go get it done, and tell me when you're finished'.
  
  Actually, if you're low to mid in the pyramid, there's probably a backup to you. If it's a big pyramid, you may be an interchangeable cog in the mechanism. Nonetheless, grab it and go!
  
  
• Most of time, 'seniors' are always happy to have accountability 'grabbers' in the mix. It makes it easier to allocate the mission requirements. And, you may quickly earn and retain the leadership label.
  
  But the 'grabbers' are sometimes seen as more interested in climbing the ladder than actually advancing the mission. So, some balance of eagerness and opportunity is required.
  
  
• Traditionally, the 'apex' is accountable for the performance of everything done in the name of the pyramid. This is accountability without personal responsibility for outcomes. The "commitment" embedded in the concept of accountability is interpreted as 'committed to ensuring a responsible person is found, assigned, and expectations for outcomes established".
  
  In the military particularly, and certainly on ships at sea, this idea is deep culture.
  
  But, that idea often gets lost. One chief executive famously said that success has many fathers, but a failure is an orphan.
  
  Worse is the chief executive who denies accountability for all but successes. That is morally corrupt and a morale killer.