Working Group B: What principles are important in dealing with complexity?

[Simon Springate]

#14926

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Thankyou Ian and Davin.  Your provoking posts emphasised to me that the one aspect you can’t “fast track” is experience, not if it is to have the depth needed to create value.  Being in a focused environment that encourages situational leadership encourages it while the rest of us wander the byways long enough to get there – and many are lost on the way.

Or perhaps I am getting lost in the analogy (:-))

[ian mack]

#14904

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Thanks Andrew, it will be interesting if your approach works, and in what conditions it is ignored.

Thanks Davin for your assistance in answering questions (the article link you referenced per my query, which I am still reading) and for your typically insightful comments. On my offering with respect to the discussions at our last meeting, perhaps it needs to be reduced to just the lists at the end as a starting point for the next meeting, along with the qualifications?

Thanks for the query as well regarding ‘situational leadership’. I have long understood the challenge of ‘being authentic’ when leading, while ‘selecting an appropriate leadership style for each situation’. As with all of us, my perspectives were developed from ‘where I was, when, with whom and what I ate’ – for me, 38 years in uniform and 15 years with Scouts Canada while in uniform in my spare time. Therefore my approach to leadership and many other activities is likely different from the corporate perspectives typically reflected in the literature – we all arrive as leaders by following different pathways.

For me, I look at situational leadership as focused on individuals, with as much or more importance than leading teams and institutions/organizations. My personal definition follows: “Situational leadership is the adoption of the engagement behaviour that best addresses the situation being experienced/expressed by a colleague, subordinate or superior in order to maintain an existing positive relationship while achieving an immediate goal”.

In the military, we teach both ‘leadership’ and ‘followership’, the latter in general being missing in most other organizations – and admittedly seen by some as controversial. For officers in particular in the Royal Canadian Navy, the most junior officers in ships are coached in both subtle and direct ways by everyone onboard, from the newest Sailor Third Class to the Commanding Officer of each vessel. Understandably, situational leadership is essential – the leadership needed to motivate individual crew members when in a combat scenario is very different than when dealing with a sailor in a compassionate situation (e.g. illness or death of a family member when offshore on operations). And the number of scenarios is as broad as one’s imagination, especially when collective team leadership is added to the leadership of individuals, and leadership ashore of military members and civilians is included.

Without doubt, there are styles of leadership, and organizations assess those in leadership positions based on the perceived success in meeting defined organizational requirements. In the military, annual performance evaluations typically include ‘situational leadership’. As for my own journey and whether for good or bad, my first ten years after leaving the Royal Military College convinced me that excellence in leadership of individuals was similar to being a chameleon, changing one’s ‘colour’ (or spots) to the environment faced so as to maximize motivation and results. Of course, this includes scenario consistency with individuals and fairness across teams. Why? Because we human beings are very emotional in our makeup – regardless of whether we show them or not – and that must be dealt with effectively when pursuing objectives.

One learns other styles when one spends 100% of one’s time leading, because leadership can be learned and taught through coaching. Hence it is why I suggest that the leaders at all tiers of governance need to be adept at situational leadership, but with the default model being a servant leadership model. I accept that not all leaders learn leadership so broadly, but I remain convinced that it is what is needed and must be the aspiration when leading in complexity. The downside is that it cannot be a new part of a leader’s inventory of responses to the environment, it must be a tool developed over their careers. . I hope that helps explain where I come from – Ian

[Davin Shellshear]

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Thank you Ian for your review and analysis of our last meeting. I suggest we use this as a starting point for our next meeting.

I have long had a problem with the idea of situational leadership, and I would like to quote an extract from Chris Mowles 2022 book ‘ Complexity – A key idea for business and society’ which suggests:

‘Whether they are explicit to us or not, our actions in the world are guided by theories about the way the world works, as the economist J.M. Keynes once observed.’ This is no less true for the way people practise as leaders and managers than it is for any other area of social life. On entering an organisation, a manager or consultant brings with them their own understanding of the world forged not just in other organisations but from their experience of their life in its entirety and the theories that they have picked up along the way.

For example, their attitude to authority is likely to be shaped as much by their early family and school life as it is from any management course they have been on. Whether they have been on management courses or not, and whatever they bring, leaders and managers will take up their roles in organisations where particular ways of managing are taken for granted, and because they may have informed thinking and acting for some considerable time in that organisation, they are hard to resist.

New entrants to organisations are more shaped than shaping because of the powerful influence of accepted ways of managing in the institution they join, which is probably shared equally by other institutions involved in similar activities.

This is an interesting phenomenon to pay attention to, because the insight about being strongly influenced by the network, of which one is part, suggests the complete opposite to much orthodox organisational literature where there is an encouragement to ‘choose’ your management or leadership ‘style. The latter idea suggests that it is in a person’s gift to decide how they are going to manage or intervene in the organisation. Claiming the reverse that the organisation a person joins will have much more effect on the way they manage than vice versa is not the same as implying that they have no choice at all. Our position in the social network in which we participate helps define us but doesn’t entirely.’

My work with vulnerability analysis would indicate that it is very hard for a leopard to change its spots. Some people are likely to try, but it often comes across as fake and is not sustained. I think situational leadership is more about trying see things from the recipient’s perspective and context, and shape your response to reflect their position and hence be more effective. It’s not really about behaving from a selection of behavioural styles that you can choose from.

Perhaps I have never really understood what others mean by situational leadership.

I suspect an underlying issue here is the tendency for organisations and managers to talk in abstractions which are often meant in a rationalist/ positivist way of smoothing over differences and conflict by appeal to some abstract concept or goal. In fact, they are often used by management to control others – e.g. an appeal to ‘our vision’ or ‘our culture’ which is meaningless to the guy on the tools. When you dive into the particular abstraction, and try to work out what is actually meant, it becomes smoke and mirrors. It will depend on context, who was there, their histories, their framework of thinking, etc. etc. An interesting reference was Trumps appeal to FREEDOM, and we are suffering from the same thing in Australia in the run up to our elections. What the hell does FREEDOM mean? the context is everything and until you reach the particular local meeting point where people connect and converse, to where it is being applied, it could mean everything and nothing.

What do you think?

Cheers

Davin

[Andrew Pyke]

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Great comment Davin.

It is my observation that it is madness to unquestioningly persist with the original wheelbarrow of scope that was approved, often years ago informed by very uncertain or even wrong information, in the face of emergence, without constant ongoing re-validation.  It is a bit in the nature of many project approval systems, that one gets one shot at walking into the throne-room for approval, so everyone loads-in anything they think may be needed.  Later, we learn that some of that value was useless and much was very low priority, and only a small amount will be highly-prized by beneficiaries.  And what happens, is that as the schedule/cost constraint is approached, high-value outcomes become jeopardised by low-value outcomes.

Do deal with this, I have been trying to pre-set, up-front in the governance arrangements for projects, the Agile principle where the project should be terminated when C(R)+C(O)>V(R), where C(R) is the residual cost of the project, C(O) is the opportunity cost of the project (not only wrt capital, but particularly wrt scarce human talent and the bandwidth of overloaded executives), and V(R) is the residual value that will be created by project completion.   Its a great question, that stirs up all the assumptions!  :-))

[Davin Shellshear]

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Hi Ian,

Attached is one of the papers by Bent Flyvbjerg and below is a link to another

ttps://www.researchgate.net/publication/235953571_How_Optimism_Bias_and_Strategic_Misrepresentation_in_Early_Project_Development_Undermine_Implementation

Cheers

Davin

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[ian mack]

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Thanks for that Davin.

Rob – would you have a link to the paper you mentioned from Bent Flyvbjerg?

I too have spent some time on mining or discussion of the last meeting (again, thanks Davin) to try to draw out some useful thoughts for us to emply going forward. The analysis is in the enclosed document for you reading pleasure team (assuming it loads properly). Hopefully it will get the juices flowing as we approach the next meeting.

Ian

 

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[Davin Shellshear]

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Hi Group B

My frivolous mind has been busy again.

I have been looking at a book ‘Streetlights and Shadows by Gary Klein – not a highly academic read but some bits of interest. One thing I though might be of interest, apropos our last meeting is a comment on goal fixation (p221). He refers to work by Abdel-Hamid and Van Wassenhove (2007) who identified an initial goal bias in which people get stuck on an initial goal. Revising targets becomes an admission of failure. He also refers to emergent goals at the project level (p216).

I thought Ian’s comments around satisficing rather than satisfying goals was relevant, particularly as there is always more than one goal, even if some are not articulated. Even in the Manhattan project, ‘we want a bomb’, I am sure the participants also had other goals such as surviving the project.

I often prefer to think in terms of objectives, the importance of the different objectives varying as context changes, or objectives disappearing and being replaced by new ones, but at least provide some sight of the lighthouse on the hill you are trying to get to, (or hope may be there), and some guidelines to improve chances of success on the way, as you trial and error your way forward– e.g. don’t pat the alligators, even though no one told you there were alligators on the way.

[Stephen Grey]

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Thanks for this Davin

Hope I’ll be able to join in next time

 

[Davin Shellshear]

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Hi Group B

Attached is the transcript of our last meeting on 21st April. I am impressed by the amount of good material that emerged – again.

Happy reading and digesting.

Cheers

Davin Shellshear

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[Davin Shellshear]

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Hi Group B

I have transcribed Ian Mack’s brilliant webinar on Governance in Complex Projects.

I thought there was too much valuable content in the discussion, so here it is.
Ian has kindly agreed to make the transcribed webinar available to Group B participants.

Cheers

Davin

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[Stephen Grey]

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Thanks David

I’ve saved it as a resource

[David Preller]

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At our last meeting I mentioned the Infrastructure Australia report entitled “Delivering Outcomes”.

This report highlights the complex environment and its impact on delivery.

The report can be found at this link:

Delivering Outcomes | Infrastructure Australia

It is worth the time to go through their finding and recommendations.

Regards

David

[Davin Shellshear]

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Hi Group B

Attached are the notes emerging from meeting 18 on 31st March 22.

I did not transcribe all the discussion around selecting the topic for the group, but rather simply added the outcomes of that discussion. The new topic is now the title for this forum.

Looking forward to our next meeting on 21st April 2022.

Cheers

Davin Shellshear

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[Sebastian Winter]

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Hello,

We’re delighted to share that the recording of our webinar with Ian Mack (@ian-mack) is now available. Access today with your ICCPM Membership. Thank you to attendees for all the great feedback!

https://iccpm.com/resource/webinar-recording-getting-governance-right-matters/

[Stephen Grey]

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Ian

I can empathise with your frustration. I’m still not quite clear how to focus my energy in this enterprise though.

I have attached a PDF of the article in case it is of interest. It was probably geo-blocked.

I have met Steve and made joint presentations with him. Context is everything and I would not draw too close a parallel between his work and defense procurement.

He used to be a consultant and analyst diagnosing the IT sector then had the opportunity to step in and do it himself. He said one of the the key reasons he took the job with the Victorian Department of Health and Human Services (name might have changed) was that it had sufficient in-house resources, money and people, to mount decent sized projects ($10-100M) on its own cognisance, without additional parliamentary or ministerial approval. This gave him the freedom to probe-sense-respond and change tack if early work on a job showed it was a good idea.

His trade-mark is the Platform+Agile approach. He worked to get the IT platforms on which applications are built stabilised and confine developments to an agile layer above that. This reduces the number and dynamic activity of interactions between systems so there is less externally stimulated volatility.

His other mantra is “Don’t do dumb stuff”, modeled on Obama I think. The big dumb thing he advocated avoiding was reinventing the wheel. For instance, if, somewhere in the Govt’s list of IT assets is an identity management service, that verifies ID for people logging into protected services, re-use it rather than building a new one. That seems so bleeding obvious it shouldn’t be news but duplicated effort and assets are commonplace. I guess it’s in the financial interest of contractors to develop as much new stuff as possible, with the consequent risk to the customer.

His approach paid off. The State Govt had become so gun shy of IT projects when he took over in Health that investment in State IT had dropped from $300M/yr to less that $30M/yr as no minister wanted to be associated with the next debacle. He got things going again and showed it could be done.

Victoria Police has its own legacy of IT messes so I expect he will have a lot to go at.

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