Cooke-Davies quoted the neuro-linguistic programmer John Grinder, who said: “If you always do what you’ve always done, you will always get what you’ve always got.”

This is especially true of modern project management, where numerous studies support the notion that we are hopeless at learning our lessons.

With this reality as a backdrop, Cooke-Davies asserted that things will only be different if you decide to make them different, that change only comes about when you decide to give time to it.

He urged the audience to listen for clues about what needs to be changed in our profession, and in our personal lives, and to make renewal part of a personal philosophy that would mean understanding what is going on in the world around you and then make changes to bring about improvement.

“As a person who has been closely associated with the PM [project management] profession for the last 20 or 30 years, I have a real interest in serious change happening in our profession,” said Cooke-Davies in his introduction.

“Renewal is a word that has been part of my life for over 60 years. All my previous experience, in theology, business, counselling and PM, has highlighted the importance of renewal.”

We forget that renewal is not a human invention – it serves a very specific purpose, and it happens in nature all the time, from the changing of the seasons, to the extinction of the dinosaurs.

A great example of how nature renews itself is the BP oil spill disaster. Recent reports show that the ocean itself had reduced the oil by 25% simply through bacterial action that broke down the oil.

Cooke-Davies believes it is appropriate for project managers to use the word “renewal” frequently, as so many of their projects are essential features in environmental, urban and industrial renewal.

A history of failure to learn

He referred to research by the Belgian Bent Flyvbjerg, and that of his own organisation Human Systems, which showed that on megaprojects, overruns in time and cost are still the order of the day – showing we have learnt little in the past 100 years; and that in spite of all the standards being developed, all the university programmes on offer, we are still not delivering projects better.

And while we are failing to learn from the past, projects are becoming increasingly complex. But there is no fundamental agreement on what complexity is.

“If you don’t know what will happen when you kick it, then it is complex,” said author and academic, Dr Terry Williams.

Cooke-Davies believes that complexity is both relative and absolute, and “complex” is different from “complicated”.

He suggests some of the typical causes of complexity are human ambition where we are always pushing the boundaries of what is possible; human and organisational behaviour and culture; a poor understanding of systemicity and its impact; and inadequate and simplistic models of complexity.

“PM was developed to cope with complexity,” says Cooke-Davies.

Stakeholder behaviour

Rodney Turner and Ralph Muller, who examined the behaviours between Project Owner as Principal, and Project Manager as Agent of the owner, identified a critical need for the alignment of interests between principal and agent, saying the more closely aligned the better – but they found that in most projects, all the driving forces are driving the interests apart rather than together.

Flyvbjerg, who picked up on Turner and Muller’s points, said that as projects get more complex, so does the issue of human interaction. The number of tiers, and the differing pressures and interests, make the prerequisites for effective principal/agent relationships harder to achieve, and the challenges presented by equivocal goals and multiple agendas far more severe.

Cooke-Davies asserts that if we are to renew project management and reverse the trend of failing to learn, then the place to start is at the human and organisational behaviour.

He identified several concepts and associated behaviours that exacerbate the trend toward failing to learn.

Prospect theory

Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky were awarded the Nobel Prize for economics in 2002 when they challenged the “expected utility theory” of decision-making under risk, which assumes humans are rational decision-makers.

They found that attitude to risk depends upon the “frame” through which it is viewed, and that people are more willing to entertain risk for what they stand to “gain” than what they stand to “lose”.

This introduces human behaviour and psychology into decision-making theory.

Delusions of success

Dan Lovallo and Daniel Kahneman (2003), in the Harvard Business Review, stated that: “In planning major initiatives, executives routinely exaggerate the benefits and discount the costs, setting themselves up for failure.”

They cited three contributory factors:

• Optimism bias, reinforced by attribution errors and the illusion of control;
• Anchoring, where a number or concept becomes anchored in the mind and clouds perspective; and
• Competitor neglect.

In his paper in the Harvard Business Review, called “Teaching Smart People how to Learn”, Chris Argyrus had earlier pointed out how bad executives are at learning, saying: “Professionals embody the learning dilemma: they are enthusiastic about continuous improvement – and often the biggest obstacle to its success.”

In other words, as Cooke-Davies put it, those who feel they have the most to lose will resist change in an organisation, the very people best poised to influence change.

Human decision-making and irrationality

English psychologist Peter Wason, who coined the term “confirmation bias”, conducted experiments nearly 50 years ago, which showed that emotion indeed drives decision-making.

Subsequent studies support the theory that we use what we see to confirm what we already decide we want to be the answer.

As Cooke-Davies explains, we make up the answer and use the neocortex of our brain to support it, thereby using rational choice to support emotion.

The “Outside Look”

Lovallo and Kahneman proposed, as a solution to “delusions of success”, the use of an “Outside Look”, which involves
five stages:

• Selecting a reference class;
• Assessing the distribution of outcomes;
• Making an intuitive prediction of your project’s position in the distribution;
• Assessing the reliability of your prediction; and
• Correcting the intuitive estimate.

Cooke-Davies reminded the audience that Flyvbjurg disagreed, saying he found strategic misrepresentation to be a bigger factor than being led astray by our thought processes, particularly when political pressures are high for the project to go ahead.

He explained that Flyvbjurg’s point was that it is not enough to have an outside look, but that one needs a “publicly accountable process” as well as an “outside look”.

What is to be done?

There is a role to be played by the individual, the project, the organisation and society in overcoming the identified impediments to change and learning:

• An individual commitment to personal growth and effectiveness;
• Team commitment to statistically proven ways of improving performance, such as learning activities (exploring, analysing and communicating errors), and after action review of what was learnt and how things can
  be improved;
• Organisation commitment to develop leadership competence that supports team learning, and developing effective post-implementation reviews; and
• Society’s commitment (professional associations) to reverse what Cooke-Davies calls the “Macdonaldisation” of project management, and support radical research into positive human and organisational behaviours; understanding the basis to human irrationality; and the relationship between systems thinking and project management in the light of developments into systems thinking in the past 30 years.

Clearly, review: looking at our projects again; reflection: looking at our projects in a different light; and renewal: introducing new and better ways to approach our projects – will be a theme for project managers to take to heart for a long time to come. 

Taryn van Olden