Shadow Working in Project Management

Understanding and Addressing the Irrational and Unconscious in Groups

Joana Bértholo

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351625654
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Shadow Working in Project Management aims at contributing to our knowledge of all things unconscious and irrational in our behaviour. It takes the form of an empirical research, and therefore addresses mostly the tools and techniques available to get in touch with Shadow aspects of self and collective, to recognize how it manifests, how it can lead to conflict, and ways to address it.

From that perspective, it advances on to question the underlying beliefs of current management practices. It explores as well the inherent need for control in projects, being those of a professional nature, or other ventures. It challenges the strength of the concept of the "rational man" and its protagonism.

Joana Bértholo's work explores the role and nature of the Shadow in the context of projects and their management, with an emphasis on techniques to address it. Despite being directed to managers and dedicated to the analyses of the managerial discourse, the tools and processes it proposes have universal relevance, based on the fact that the Shadow is everywhere, within everyone, from the individual to the global scale.

Part I

The Learning Journey

Introduction

I looked, and looked, and this I came to see,

That what I thought was you and you,

Was really me and me.¹

—Ken Wilber (1979)

This book is the result of a research project undertaken between 2009 and 2013 in different locations worldwide. It tells the story of an experiential autoethnography, the “Learning Journey,” which sought techniques and methods that address unconscious and subconscious communication, especially as it manifests in groups. Informed by the insights acquired in this learning journey, the author then approached project management culture and practices.

The aim of this work is to enrich our current understanding of project management with insights from other fields of knowledge, namely psychology – particularly Jungian theory – sociology, the Integral Sciences, transpersonal studies, creative practices, and the arts.

The reader of this book will find a constant appreciation for an alternative view of management as a process rather than a result or an ideal state of affairs. Managing, as considered in this work, is both an individual and a collective opportunity for responsible and integrated agency – mindful and conscious doing – rather than a discrete moment calling for instrumental agency and matter-of-fact solutions. The interdependent and co-creative view of reality at the core of this work is likely to contrast with the prevailing deterministic view that governs current project management thinking. The current paradigm of the individual as “rational actor” is hereby challenged, not to maintain that it is incorrect, only that it is limited in scope. However, the goal is not to prove rational approaches obsolete, or to discredit the way we currently go about handling projects: there was no aim to refute current knowledge, only to expand it.

Some premises to the research should be clarified beforehand:

• The existence of an unconscious realm within every individual psyche and the possibility of a collective realm where these gather;
• The view of the leader and project manager as participating in a shared psychological structure wherein unconscious factors play a significant role;
• The evidence that individuals deny traits that belong to them, for reasons to be explored, but which basically stand as a threat to their sense of self, here referred to as the Shadow;
• The acknowledgment of the role that unconscious material plays out in everyday life in the form of projection, slips of tongue, nervous tics, daydreaming, etc.
• The collective as a source of tension between individual needs and collective needs;

The ideas in this book presuppose both the existence of a realm beyond our awareness and a constant acting out of unconscious drives. This book posits that a lot of what we do, think, and feel is generated from motivations that are not always known. The consequences of these premises are manifold. For example, the way by which any project manager handles any given situation cannot be solely attributed to personality, nor is it merely a result of acquired competencies and learned conduct. These rational aspects, although they are ever present, are in fact in relation to a larger totality. Hence, to address this larger totality is to enrich our knowledge of human agency.

Another important assumption that will play a role in this text is that the unconscious –that what is outside of awareness – permanently plays out in our everyday lives (see the work of Freud, Jung, Wilber, and Zweig). Unconscious urges can take the form of daydreaming, nervous tics, or slips of the tongue, as in the well-known Freudian slip, which includes not only verbal slips, but also misreadings, mishearings, temporary forgettings, and the mislaying and losing of objects. Projection and transference mechanisms are the central mechanisms studied in this project. These have been retrieved from the somewhat obscure jargon of the analyst or the psychologist and are increasingly integrated in popular culture and everyday discourse. Nonetheless, we still don’t fully understand the extent to which management situations are informed by unconscious factors.

The collective unknown

Developed by the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung, the concept of Shadow stands for the hidden, rejected, and repressed parts of each of an individual’s personality, in other words, “the thing a person has no wish to be” (Jung, CW16). It is one of the most important archetypes in the individuation process and it has both an individual as well as a collective element. Being able to recognize and own the Shadow releases energy, enhances motivation, promotes trust, and tackles group defence mechanisms such as “fancy footwork” and “skilled incompetence” (Argyris, 1990), “immunity to change” (Kegan & Lahey, 2009), scapegoating, and conflicts at large. It ultimately protects project management from self-boycotting mechanisms and other prevailing causes of failure.

The complexity raised by the human factor in projects is due partly to a weak understanding of collective behaviour. The discourse around how the unconscious manifests at a collective level is still imprecise and charged with mysticism. Very frequently, the collective Shadow is equated with “pure evil” and felt as a threat. Some of the darkest expressions of the collective Shadow are war, racism, and exploitation. Nonetheless, the collective Shadow is also something that we constantly experience in our daily lives, becoming manifest among the groups, teams, or tribes we belong to. Common phenomena such as projection, competition, corruption, scapegoating, group rivalry, deceit, interpersonal clashes, and taboos can all be studied with the Shadow as a research frame. Doing so enables us to articulate topics that are otherwise vague or prone to mystical reasoning, as for example the collective unconscious or the nature of mass phenomena. Regardless of the historical evidence from political analysts such as Macchiavelli (1608–1653), social commentators such as Mayhew (1812–1887), and social theorists such as Weber – all of whom stressed the importance of unintended consequences – and despite the contemporary authors included in the literature review in this book, organizational theory has nonetheless tended to place emphasis on the productive (the material, or the positive), treating darker or destructive manifestations of human behaviour as exceptional, abnormal, dysfunctional, or pathological.²

Some other topics explored in this book include our confidence in individuals as rational actors and how this limits human agency and potential, the myth of control, the idea of unmanageability, communication taboos, the hubris of management, and the dark side of leadership. Given all this, a project manager who can recognize both the individual and the collective Shadow will be better equipped to lead a project to the next level of mindfulness and awareness and, consequently, performance.

Cross-cultural complex project management

This book advances the concept of cross-cultural complexity in projects by exploring the connection between the Shadow, cross-cultural divergences, and the rise of conflict. Project management is approached as a process and a complex phenomenon in itself. Each project is approached as a self-sustaining culture. Cultures can differ greatly from project to project, despite the fact that different cultures can participate in similar cultures and share cultural traits.

When we talk about the connection between the Shadow and complexity, we talk of our inescapable interdependency, and of the intricacy of human collective psychology. Cultural complexity is a major hindrance to project success³ and the Shadow serves as a good frame in order to understand why. Though organizational culture has received a lot of attention in management and academic literature, some researchers have argued that project management literature pays little attention to cross-cultural aspects.⁴ This book attempts to establish how projects can increase their chances of failure when they do not take into account their cultural Shadow and cross-cultural intricacy, factors that help to understand why so many international assignments end in failure.

The collective unknown is still a considerable taboo in social research and cultural studies.⁵ To study our relationship with the Shadow is to gain resources for managing unknown and uncertain environments (Cavallo, 2010),⁶ high uncertainty and risk in projects (Loch et al., 2006),⁷ and unexpected developments (Weick & Sutcliffe, 2003).⁸ Taking the Shadow into account can compensate for the trend towards more demanding project situations with more control structures and more linear thinking:

The world sees project management from a positivist perspective (set of methods and tools interacting with other fields of management and engineering). This leads to linearity and over simplification when attempting to solve complex problems and is inadequate to explain the true nature of project management. Further, there is a need to question the appropriateness of the current paradigms. I concur and argue that project management is a complex discipline as it deals with complex reality.⁹

In this book, we will see how this oversimplification can strengthen the Shadow. Jones (2004) explains how the Shadow – when expressed in rigid or authoritative forms of control – can escalate challenges that arise with the growing complexity of cultural contexts:

As long as the management literature continues to treat the manager-leader role as super-ordinate and control oriented, and as endowed with formal authorities, rather than as a growing individual within the organizational role, management and leadership development and organizational change are limited to learning approaches that involve acquiring ever increasing numbers of competencies to combat the ever increasing complexity being defined within systems.¹⁰

Working understanding of project management

What is management? There is no straightforward answer to this question and the problem is not one of definition. It is not that there is some ‘thing’ – management – to be described and, in being described, delineated from the universe of other ‘things’. Rather, the shifting meanings attached to management reflect the contestations around the social construction of management.¹¹

—Christopher Grey

In this book, the definition of “management” was intentionally left open to enable the study of project management in its many occurrences, each of which contributes its share to the social and collective construction of management.¹² Emphasis was nevertheless given to those definitions that interpret management as process, rather than an outcome – and as a socially constructed process, as dear is to the tradition of cultural studies. According to Weaver (2007), project management is:

Largely a creation of the ‘project management associations’ over the last 30 to 40 years. During this period, they have developed a generally consistent view of the processes involved in ‘modern project management’, encoded these views into ‘Bodies of Knowledge’ (BoKs), describe competent behaviours and are now certifying knowledgeabl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Foreword
• Part I The Learning Journey
• Part II The Shadow of project management
• Part III Closing thoughts
• Index