Second Turn: Structure For Resilience

The Second Turn of “The Four Dharmas Of Project Management” is titled “Structure For Resilience”. In this view a project is a human system working towards a desired goal. However, the project is running within an environment that is changing continuously. The project needs ways to deal with these changes and still keep performing its function, that is, reaching the desired goal. The project needs “resilience”.

Structure For Resilience

“Resilience is… the ability to absorb disturbances, to be changed and then to re-organize and still have the same identity (retain the same basic structure and ways of functioning). It includes the ability to learn from the disturbance. A resilient system is forgiving of external shocks. As resilience declines the magnitude of a shock from which it cannot recover gets smaller and smaller. Resilience shifts attention from purely growth and efficiency to needed recovery and flexibility. Growth and efficiency alone can often lead ecological systems, businesses and societies into fragile rigidities, exposing them to turbulent transformation. Learning, recovery and flexibility open eyes to novelty and new worlds of opportunity.”

In complex adaptive systems (like a human system) an important concept that allows for adaptive capacity is “self organization”. According to Wikipedia: “Self-organization is a process in which the internal organization of a system, normally an open system, increases in complexity without being guided or managed by an outside source.”

In contrast to a traditional central plan-and-control organization this would allow for individuals to act fast upon changes in the environment, it would allocate the proper resources to a problem more efficiently. There is no central bottleneck for information which consumes time. There is no central point of decision that has only a fraction of the collective mental capacity.

Group Identity

But self-organization is only part of the story. For human interactions to work properly as a group, an identity is needed. If people want to be associated with the organization, self-organization becomes natural and very effective. The desire to be part of the group creates tremendous motivation, it creates a sense of trust (which allows for continuous and transparent communication), and fulfilling the identity creates alignment among the members.

If you have a hot cause with cool solutions that inspire people, motivated people will work hard to achieve the big audacious goal. They will love and respect everyone else working on the same cause. The similarity in interests will enhance trust, which will open up communication channels big time. The culture that emerges allows like-minded people on board and eliminates slackers. The overall goal will function as a beacon for all activities, it aligns the groups activities.

Continuous Transparent Feedback

A system always 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.

It is therefor essential that the organization members get continuous feedback on their own performance and the environment. This is where the use of analytics, metrics and “in-your-face” information visualization comes in.

Second Turn Summarized

• Leadership provides big ambitious goals, it creates an identity that the organization members want to be associated with. It is all about creating Hot Causes and Cool Solutions. This creates motivation, this creates a cause, this bootstraps the creation of a specific culture.
• The team becomes self-organizing with the ambitious goal for alignment, and the emerging culture for “rules of interaction” within the group.
• The group identity creates trust, which creates proper communication.
• Metrics and analysis of the group performance and environment is used as a feedback loop directly into the team for self-organization.
• Transparency of communication ensures nobody is cheating the system.

Role Of Project Manager

• Bootstrap identity and culture
• Nurture identity and culture
• Nurture flow of information (continuous and transparent)

Tip: if you want to see what this effectively means for managing virtual teams I recommend this great presentation by Jessica Lipnack.