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

[Sebastian Winter]

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Hello,

As you may have received via email, ICCPM is conducting a short survey to gauge people’s interest on possible topics for the International Roundtable Series 22-23.

As a participant of MRC SIG, we value your opinion and hope to learn about your preferred topics. Please consider taking a few minutes to complete this short survey.

[Simon Springate]

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If you do not have a link to the polarities mural please email me at simon.springate@jacobs.com and I will send you one through.

[Davin Shellshear]

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To all ICCPM Group B participants

We had a great start to our polarity mapping session on 17 February 2022 – with the initial polarity points selected by the group being ‘Complex v Linear’

Given we were all learning about polarity mapping as we undertook the exercise, we made good progress.

We now have a good opportunity to use the intervening 3 weeks till the next Group B meeting to continue to work individually on the Mural virtual whiteboard.

You should all have access to the site through invitations from Simon Springate.

Can I suggest we focus on the following:

1. Based on our experiences to date, would you like to consider alternative polarity points that the group could consider after the current exercise has been completed. Use post-it notes to put them somewhere on the whiteboard space.
2. Would you please add comments, suggestions and new entries to the current polarity map using post-it notes
   1. to any of the entries to date
   2. adding your thoughts to action steps for either pole
   3. adding your thoughts to early warnings for either pole

If you have general suggestions, new direction, comments or whatever on the current direction of Group B, I would encourage to use the Group B forum to post those thoughts.

I would love to see the forum become a very active sharing place for all Group B participants.

You are very welcome to invite other ICCPM members to join our next Group B meeting. We can extend invitations to the Mural whiteboard either we they attend the next meeting, or by contacting Simon in the meantime (via the forum). Simon will need their email address in order to extend the invitation.

A couple of Chat comments from Colin Smith may be of interest to the group:

Collin Smith  to  Everyone:

In an actual application in relation to an identified project or program the important thing to keep in mind is the context and purpose of the system. Which may be undertaken at various levels of recursion (Systems of Systems).  Focusing on the “system in focus” you begin with the Greater Purpose and Deeper Fear statement as part of setting the scene to then unpack so called system dilemmas (i.e. polarities)

Remember that the point is that something is a polarity if there is tension between two seemingly opposing values that are both NECCESSARY. This is why the Polarity Map usually has AND in the middle of the two identified poles rather than VERSUS / OR.  Therefore what we are ultimately trying to do is to identify the value of both sides of the polarity.  So in the case of Complex and Non-complex poles in a polarity mapping activity we are looking for how we might balance the appropriateness of both approached as required given different aspect of the project / program. This is captured in the action, early warning signs etc.

[Andrew Pyke]

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Team,

FYI, those extra polarities that I orally referred to, were:

Sellable AND doable

Satisfaction now AND satisfaction later

Their Truth AND Our Truth

Theoretical AND Practical

Design AND Build

Ideal AND Pragmatic

Value for money AND Money for value

Perception AND Substance

Intentions AND Consequences

Obedience AND Guidance

Conformance AND Performance

AGILE AND Waterfall

[ian mack]

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Thanks Andrew. I am not sure how we plan to proceed. Will MURAL be in our ZOOM Call boundaries so we do not need to log into MURAL or have two screens please? I must admit I will give this a try in this session but may pass on it in the next couple of meetings.     Ian

[Andrew Pyke]

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Attached are two useful resources for those encountering Polarity Management for the first time.

Attachments:

You must be logged in to view attached files.

[Santhosh Therakam]

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Thanks Gavin for sharing the transcript. My apologies as I was unable to attend last two sessions due to work exigencies.

I use Mural quite extensively in business as well and is a very good collaborative tool. Once Simon sets it up and sends us a link, the members can access the mural and work independently or in groups simultaneously. You don’t need license to access this platform!

See you all in the next meeting. Cheers

[Davin Shellshear]

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Hi Group B,

Attached is the transcript from the last meeting.

Our next meeting should be really fascinating in developing a polarity map using ICCPM’s Zoom and Simon’s MURAL as the shared virtual whiteboard.

We invite all SIG members to participate and we can readily include everyone in the MURAL whiteboard by sending a link once you join.

Cheers

Davin

Attachments:

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[Andrew Pyke]

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Davin,

As per action today, I will work with Simon to extract candidate polarities from this, ready for group work at the next SIG meeting.

[Davin Shellshear]

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Hi Group B – I have spent some time extracting narrative and comments from our first 13 meetings. This was to provide data for the webinar on 25th January – trying to derive an overview from all the rich content of the meetings.

In order to make sense of what I extracted, I sorted the data into an excel sheet with the categories of Behaviours, Collaboration, Communication, Control, Decision Making and Risk, Expectations, Innovation, Leadership, Maturity, Mindset, Options, PDCA, Principles, Stakeholders, Stories, and Transience.

I don’t propose that these categories are right or even good, but it was useful for me at the time.

The narrative list is attached, and I invite MRC SIG members to consider how this data might be used. For the Webinar, I have suggested the option of using the data to develop a Polarity Map – trying to find the path of ‘AND’ for complexity approaches and linear approaches. As we have said, most projects have elements of both.

You may have some much more exciting options.

Cheers and hope to see you at the webinar on 25th Jan 22.

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[Stephen Grey]

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Thanks Ian

This is all starting to gel

On the matter of presenting your observations on leadership, I agree it’s not core to the group but it might cross fertilise it

Steve

[Davin Shellshear]

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Steve

You asked me to elaborate on “When you read the notes that I will transcribe, you will see that there is a context in which you use expectation that makes it really alive and real. When you spoke in the context I was impressed.”?

I have seen on many occasions expectations of project/ program leadership and management teams clearly articulated and simply not followed. The consequences for the project are never good. Hence my start point is a degree of cynicism (ref bounded rationality). However Ian made it clear that his expectations applied equally to him as the project senior, and he articulated a set of positive behaviours that we inevitably seek and rarely get. It’s not that there is a lack of guidelines or narrative that describes behaviours expected of leadership, it just rarely happens. Hence my challenge to Ian to find 12 other people who do this.

I think this happens because of the collective worldviews of these teams, and misalignment of behavioural predispositions and expectations. The teams can work hard to mitigate misalignment, and drawing on the skills and approached of all members of the teams may help. However under stress, these teams always seem to revert to old, and usually inappropriate behaviours.

In my dealings with Ian in Group B, I believe that these behaviors are what Ian shows – a natural leader! When I saw Ian’s wider description, I felt really elated to see that someone actually got it, and did it.

[ian mack]

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Thanks Stephen. A lot of thinking in your words and I agree generally with all you offered. I would pick up on two points specifically:

– As a principle, you offered: “No one should assume that past experience, good or bad, is necessarily an indicator of future performance, when dealing with complexity”. I agree and have seen this often. I think that many things preclude repeated success (or failure): the team and relationships around them and on the other side of the contract, the broader environmental context, confidence bias (which means being less open to new ideas and emerging practices if one survived their first complex project) or just being worn out.

– You also offer as part of or the whole purpose of our next tranche of work as: “Identify ways to interact with people that leave them better able to manage complex projects”. This avoids the language issue around mindset, perspectives, expectations and the like – I can go along with that. But we seem to have lost the principles aspect or the content or means that we also should be identifying? I think your option is more along the lines of : “Identify ways to interact with people and the means to leave them better able to deliver complex projects”? I prefer ‘expectation management’ as the “way” because of my past experience, and ‘deliver’ because I am not a fan of the term ‘manage’ for complexity in general or for its treatment of ‘risk’ in particular – but the means to potentially leave them better able to get the job done is great.

With regards to me offering any workshop regarding the leadership style employed that most times worked (not always), I could do that as a parallel activity (with preparation) but I am not sure it would be on the critical path of our SIG work.

Onward Team later in the month!  Ian

[Stephen Grey]

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Davin

I have been through the notes and made some comments

Got a bit carried away but it does include some pictures :)

I’m not precious about any of this so I hope the group will use anyhting useful and ignore the rest

Steve

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[ian mack]

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Thank you Davin for this and all the other painstaking transcriptions of our  rambling thoughts. To you and the whole team, very best wishes to all and more broadly to out troubled world in 2022. (Stay safe and healthy).  Ian

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