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in reply to: Examples of complexity and emergence #20067Up::0
Rob
I can see what you are after and a few examples might be educational
I apologise if the following has been considered in recent meetings as I have been unable to devote the time to join in but, I have two concerns
1. The more exciting, intricate and attention grabbing an example is, chosen to make the complexity clear and unequivocal, the more likely it is that some people who really should be thinking about complexity will feel that it is nothing relevant to their more mundane work. They might well decide it’s all a bit overblown for them and back off.
2. One of the key lessons I have taken from this work is that almost every project has some potential for complex behaviour whether in its internal management or seen in its broader organisation and governance context.
Rather than thinking in terms of whether one should be concerned about complexity on a project or if the project team is justified in dismissing it, I feel it is more useful to assume every project has some potential for complex behaviour. Some businesses demand a statement of the riskiness and complexity of a project as part of the funding application. This routinely leads to strategic misrepresentation by teams seeking to ensure their budget is approved and that they can keep senior management off their back,
I would recommend any project assume some part, even if only small, ask how powerful is the complexity it might face, and either:
- address that which can be seen or
- prepare for it to become apparent later.
Once it has been dismissed from the minds of a project team, it will be a devil of a job to drag them back to it but, if a constant low level acknowledgement of complexity is part of normal business, it need not absorb much time but it might offer both an early warning mechanism and provide a hook for concerns about complexity to be taken up and given serious attention if necessary.
Some of Ian’s comments about what he saw as important resources and mechanisms to manage large complex projects hold a mirror up to what people should be alert to, a few from memory are:
- resources available to estimate the cost and schedule implication of unplanned changes swiftly – complexity associated with changes from plans
- close relationships with steering committee and other governance authorities – complexity associated with the organisational and regulatory context
- an intelligence network in the project through which the Director can be kept informed of trends, developing issues etc. – complexity associated with gaps between reality and the information being used to manage the work
There are more and I might not have expressed them well but, rather than say “Look at this project, it was complex” I am inclined to say “Here are features of a project that represent or can lead to complex behaviour” and perhaps follow that up with a case study. Draw attention to the mechanisms at work, with outlines of light weight and more profound variants, and paint a picture of it using examples as explanatory information. The mechanisms are open to generalisation and adoption by anyone but the examples might be somewhat narrow by virtue of being about a particular sector or technology.
Steve
Up::0Ian
It probably was my name you saw
I haven’t really explored complexity mapping as a method but I have written one or two pieces on complexity, as much to push my own thinking as to convey information to others, although I hope some people found them useful
The papers I’ve put up on Broadleaf’s web site referring to complexity are at https://broadleaf.com.au/?s=complexity
I was particularly pleased with Complexity – What’s new? https://broadleaf.com.au/resource-material/complexity-whats-new/
The ideas set out in Charles E. Lindblom’s paper describing two approaches to decision making in public administration (The Science of “Muddling Through” 1959) are a simple and powerful explanation of limits on the quality of decision making
I was also very pleased with Figure 3 – an attempt to illustrate people with separate views interacting to develop a shared understanding. It’s set in the context of the anecdote circles practice but other approaches to bringing people together might easily achieve the same goal
Up::0Davin
I am interested in providing feedback on complexity mapping when the time arises
Thanks
Steve
Up::0Robert
Yes
In fact, multiple independent stakeholders with diverse priorities and the ability to influence the conduct of a project seems to me to be one of the clearest cases of complexity. Each stakeholder can make or demand adjustments to suit their objectives. These adjustments will affect other stakeholders, probably causing some of them to seek further adjustments. The adjustments don’t need to be very large for the scope and direction of a project to shift incrementally and ultimately move well away from its starting point.
Even if the stakeholders are constrained by change control, achieving consensus on decisions might bog the whole thing down.
I saw this on the TAFE student record project. A central project sought to engage all the TAFEs in procuring a single platform to hold and maintain student records.
For the benefit of the non-Australian members, TAFEs are Tertiary and Further Education colleges. Less academic that universities and offering everything from trade skills to hospitality, hairdressing, teaching, allied health, personal care, accounting and administration.
The core funding was to engage a contractor to specify, design and produce the platform based on consultation with the TAFEs and having regard to a myriad of existing hand made systems that used paper records, spreadsheets, small data bases, text files and other platforms to fulfill the function – all different from one TAFE to the next. Each TAFE not only had a different set of homemade tools, each TAFE’s systems were not integrated. They were an aggregate of half a dozen ad hoc responses to record keeping requirement that had emerged over many years in each organisation. The record keeping requirements of each TAFE differed (data base fields) and staff were not keen to relinquish their little bit of power.
Protracted decision making and reluctance in the TAFEs to fund the data gathering and cleansing required, a key planning assumption, led to the single pilot implementation exhausting the funding intended to kit out a couple of dozen organisations.
I think the pilot was declared a success and it all shut down. I didn’t hear much about it after that.
No real technical complexity, just basic data base design and implementation.
All to do with multiple independent stakeholders with differing priorities and the capacity to influence the direction and execution of the project.
Steve
Up::0Team,
I am watching proceedings in the background but unable to rejoin the discussions
Looking after invalid relatives and working on a very interesting infrastructure project leave me little discretionary time
I’m sure the group will continue to turn out great stuff
My loss I’m afraid
Best wishes
Steve
Up::0First, I am sorry that I have commitments on Thursday morning that will prevent me from joinng you
Second, a quick comment on Simon’s bullet points
The first one “What is it (Transition)” goes to the issue I have raised a few times and on which Davin has kindly sent me some papers, which I have not yet been able to read
Transitions arising from and visible in tangible features of a project are very important and can have profound consequences
I don’t think I am alone in having seen transitions in the mood of a project team that cannot be seen immediately in the usual metrics and KPIs that senior managers like to see when they are trying to assess the health of a project
A project whose personnel become convinced they have failed, looses faith in their ability to meet key milestones and becomes disengaged – why bother, we are doomed anyway but I need the job so I’ll hang on – is one scenario that I think can arise from complexity because every attempt to fix things throws up unintended consequences that make life worse and there is no clear vision of the long term
Another pathological scenario is where middle managers look first to protect their own reputation no matter how badly it affects the job as a whole, transitioning from being members of a team to being street fighters protecting their patch
Yet another is where every decision is made with a short term focus and everyone is frenetic, looking at immediate consequences with no strategic vision – don’t bother me with details, just tell me what to do tomorrow
Spotting projects that are slipping into these conditions and assisting them might be even more challenging than dealing with tangible transitions, as important as they are
So, if we can, I would like to leave the door open to exploring transitions in greater depth and diversity
Steve
Up::0ICCPM-2023-2-Transition-Exploration-Paper-V1 is looking good. I think it will open a few eyes.
One point I want to add to the discussion is that, to my eyes, I think the last three examples of common transitions on page 4 are the closest to where I started thinking about transitions, i.e.:
- changes to knowledge levels, level of complexity, vision for the project, strengths or weaknesses within the broad project enterprise, cultural behaviours, relationships or the capability to adapt,
- a degree of unexplained chaos somewhere in the project enterprise, and
- emerging practices that are going awry or are not receiving continuous support from people across the project’s enterprise
The three examples above seem to me to involve changes in the internal dynamics of the project. A lot of the others represent changes in outcomes or overt characteristics.
This is not to diminish the importance of the other types of transitions and the need to encourage people to think about them all.
I can’t prove it, but I feel that projects that start out well ordered and able to respond to perturbations in a controlled manner, can shift (transition) to a state where they are more febrile. In this state, changes in one area that are made deliberately, or result from unforeseen internal developments, or are imposed by external actors and influences, can stimulate disturbances elsewhere in the project more distantly, more swiftly and more violently than they would have before this transition.
This is not a transition in the observable state of the project so much as a transition of its stability. The tempo of internal interactions increases as does the magnitude of the disturbances they create. Something analogous to an elderly person suffering minor strokes and low level heart attacks who becomes more vulnerable and needs more urgent, immediate, medical attention as the attrition of each incident takes its toll on the ability of their physiology to correct itself (not a perfect analogy but the human body can be a useful model). Externally they might look much the same as they did five years ago to an independent observer, but they have gone, progressively, from being in a relatively stable condition to living on a knife edge (more or less what happened to my father in the last decade of his life).
I am sorry I have not been more engaged lately and I hope this does not seem disruptive. The point I am making takes nothing away from the thrust of the paper. Perhaps it draws attention to an intangible feature of large complex projects and I am not clear yet how one examines or influences that.
Up::0Looking for patterns you have seen before is useful but won’t be a comprehensive solution for a complex system because the next challenge may well be qualitatively and quantitatively different from anything you have seen before
An enquiring mind and tools that help show us information in which there might be patterns are one way to break through
Cognitive Edge SenseMaker is in that vein
Up::0A post today on LinkedIn by John Hollmann, exponent of parametric cost and schedule risk analysis, drew my attention to this paper
https://ascelibrary.org/doi/abs/10.1061/%28ASCE%29CO.1943-7862.0001876
I can’t access the whole paper but I don’t think I need to
If you look at the abstract, it makes some interesting points drawn from the authors’ research. Using the abbreviation OOS for Out of Sequence Work, they say:
- “… approximately 15% of project activities are performed as OOS, resulting in 33% growth in construction schedule and 25% additional construction cost”
- “… OOS has a statistically significant inverse correlation with the productivity index (not a surprise) … a 5% increase in OOS was shown to be associated with an 8.5% drop in productivity, 10% increase in construction cost, and 11% increase in construction schedule”
- “… unplanned overtime, trade stacking, rework, as well as request for information (RFI) enumeration and processing time have significant direct correlation with OOS”
- “… overall collaboration among project team members is inversely correlated with OOS”
- “… alignment, front-end planning, constructability, planning for startup, and 3D modeling), the study found that the five practices are inversely correlated with OOS, especially when collaboratively implemented early and often throughout the project”
On the other hand, “Project complexity, construction pace (traditional versus phased), percent design completion prior to construction, and the use of second shifts were not found to be statistically correlated with OOS”
Up::0I just remembered that about 35 years ago I was the external examiner on a PhD that addressed the prospects of monitoring keyword usage in major project correspondence, mainly email
It was a rather turgid thesis that, from memory, took a long time to make a simple point, that ‘chatter’ could provide a machine accessible resource to spot the rise of new issues
The author did not really demonstrate evidence of putting it into operation but I thought I’d drop it in here for interest
Up::0Having been unable to make it to many meetings, but still extremely interested, I’ve just been trawling through materials from the past month or so. I can’t claim this is methodical – just notes in case they spark a thought.
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RE: Notes Arising from Working Group B Meeting 19 January 2023
<<Tony: … thinking about the different types of transitions. I suggested that we might benefit by thinking about types of transition, not just complexity in transitions. I offered 4 types which were:
• a planned transition,
• a deviation,
• a major disturbance, and
• a change of fundamentals.>>SG: I have no idea how to approach this, but I have a sense that cultural and attitudinal change plays a role in the challenges presented by complex projects. This is a different kettle of fish from these four objective observable types of transitions.
In the simplified scenario I described in the paper about a descent into chaos, I had in mind a mood taking hold of a team who shift from working systematically within a long term plan to fire fighting with their minds dominated by short term concerns, getting through the next quarterly review.
I don’t think many project directors leading a team of more than a hundred people, or possible many more, would necessarily pick up on that before it took hold. The consequences would start to show up in progressive slippage and loss of productivity but, with the characteristic response time of very large projects (suspect there is a problem, look into it, confirm there is a problem, seek to localise it, possibly fail to localise it if a mood of fire fighting has spread, work up the courage to tell the boss, figure out a recovery strategy, enact it …) being a few months, the value of sensing the emerging behavioural change early could be significant.
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<<Davin: Ian has offered a potential topic statement:
SG: What should practitioners understand about transitions, …>>
That sounds like a useful umbrella topic within which anything we are likely to want to explore can be covered.
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<< Ian: Even though the topic might generate some good discussion, I’m struggling to see what we can do with it to create a product.>>
SG: I suspect that, among many things a project manager or director needs to cope with transitions, one of the most useful is to be able to spot it coming. Simon commented on this (11 Jan 2023).
Those that arise externally or in governance bodies above a project might be spotted through relationships and networks. The reference to Power Dynamics is probably relevant here.
I’ve wondered for some time how leaders on a very large project gain the same sort of intelligence about the work going on below them: their own staff, interactions between those staff and contractors, interactions between separate contractors, working relationships on the ground, in the design offices and so on.
Further on this, the language in the discussion about transitions suggests to me that they are being seen as having event like characteristics – they happen, we become aware of them in an instant even if they have been developing for some time, and once they have happened they are a feature of the landscape from that point on. One of the intriguing ideas Snowden has spoken about is weak signals of shifts in a system that creep up on us. These are small individual occurrences that presage something more significant. Their importance might lie in them being dotted about through a project, dispersed geographically or across the organisational structure of the project.
I can’t say my thinking on this is very mature yet but I can recall, as one example, a mine development in SE Asia where transport and logistics blew the budget. Poor local roads interfered with moving earth, construction materials, major equipment items, people and pretty much anything required to maintain the schedule. I wasn’t close as it blew out but I was in on the initial forecasting and then a few years later as an expert witness when the Owners sued the prime contractor. Part of the problem was optimistic forecasting, by the Owner’s team, and part was that it got out of hand.
One day, I believe organisation, including large projects, will seek ways to stay in touch with the mood and daily observations of the workforce on the ground. Annual staff satisfaction surveys are no use for that. Something more subtle and on a shorter time cycle will be required.
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Up::0Ian
It’s useful to rephrase points and restate them. Each time we have the prospect of sparking an additional insight or consolidating material we have already settled.
In the worst examples of the behaviour I described, the dominant management style has been bullying and intimidation with the promise of significant financial bonuses for acquiescing.
A really uncomfortable environment.
Up::0Ian
I am learning a lot here too
One point I need to clarify is that the schedule slipping out of control is a serious matter and all that we have both said applies to that but I feel there is a more subtle behavioural issue behind that
When we see people with time and little pressure working through the planning and management of a job, they respect the data, they pay attention and do a thorough job – exploring details and connections between their tasks and other parts of the project
When the pressure comes on, their behaviour changes so they become inclined to accept a course of action they have not explored fully if it offers the prospect on visible progress in short order
I don’t know how we detect that but I reckon it would have shown red beacons flashing at many desks in some of the big mining jobs where I’ve been engaged for risk assessment
One current projects jokes about the Christmas ritual of getting Steve back to rework the analysis with the new plan
Another job, long past now, had me in at three resubmissions, each a couple of years apart, with the cost estimate being $N at the first one, $2N at the second and $3N at the third – all very large numbers
Each one descended into chaos as so much changed and change control was not as rigorous as it might have been that no one knew what was going on and the latest project director had to stand the job down and rework it
On the second and third reworking, I was coming into an office full of people who had been beaten up for months as the current project director tried to save the job. They were blinkered by self preservation to only look at the issue in front of them – no inclination to examine or explore more widely so each time things fell apart
I was then pulled in towards the end of the third iteration to see if they could convince the Board this one would work
The stress on the faces of mature experienced engineers and managers was quite unsettling
In the end, they found a way to say it had been completed then closed and sold the assets a year or so later
The state of mind of those people was really the biggest red flag but no one is keen to acknowledge anything like that, let alone accept what lies behind it, what it signifies, and remedy that
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