Managing Projects in a World of People, Strategy and Change

Darren Dalcher

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780429831591
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Project management is at a crossroads: There is a pressing need to rethink the approaches used in initiating, managing and governing projects, programmes and change initiatives. The aim of this book is to progress the dialogue around project practice by shifting the focus from instrumental methods and prescriptive techniques towards a context-sensitive consideration of people, strategy and change.

Projects are initiated to deliver agreed outputs that can be translated into meaningful outcomes capable of satisfying the wishes and expectations for improvement and development. Yet, people, strategy and change, which are largely ignored by the conventional bodies of knowledge, are clearly central to the sustainable and enduring success of projects, efforts and initiatives.

The volume brings together some of the best writing by leading authorities on key topics including trust, ethics, people, psychology, requirements, project performance, audits, uncertainty, anti-fragility, strategic initiatives, governance, change management and commercial management. The collection offers an invaluable new resource for informed managers looking to engage with the latest thinking and research.

1

Ethics

IT STARTS WITH TRUST: PEOPLE, PERSPECTIVES AND RELATIONSHIPS AS THE BUILDING BLOCKS FOR SUSTAINABLE SUCCESS

Darren Dalcher

Trust plays a crucial part in many facets of life, including politics, business, sport, friendship, love, marriage and, indeed, all human relationships. Trust appears to be a critical precondition for success in most human endeavours involving more than one individual. Trust can typically appear as a social construct or a psychological belief and may often touch on ethical, personal or organisational values.

The Oxford Dictionary defines trust as ‘firm belief in the reliability, truth, or ability of someone or something’. The word trust does not appear in the index of the main bodies of knowledge, and only receives a passing mention in the 5th edition of the Project Management Institute (PMI) Guide to the Body of Knowledge as a key part of the interpersonal skills of effective project managers. Yet, many aspects of project practice, including teamwork, power, delegation, influencing, reporting, stakeholder engagement and even leadership, intimately rely on the establishment and continued preservation of trust between individuals, team members, parties and organisations.

Assessing the crucial role of the concept, American educator, writer and public speaker Stephen R. Covey observed that ‘trust is the glue of life. It’s the most essential ingredient in effective communication. It’s the foundational principle that holds all relationships together’ (Covey, 1995, p. 203).

The five paradoxes of trust

The issue of trust evokes deeply held practical as well as philosophical contradictions and paradoxes. Revolutionary Russian communist Vladimir Ilyich Lenin opined that ‘trust is good, but control is better’. Former US President Ronald Reagan, who held a rather different perspective on world affairs, subsequently borrowed an often-used Russian proverb that translates as ‘trust, but verify’ and used it as the basis for international relations and negotiations with the Russians. International relations often uncover perplexing dependencies and relationships as partners and competitors share, reflect, respond and copy strategies. None the less, the issue of trust and our interaction with the concept continues to offer confounding enigmas and quandaries which will be explored through the lens of the five (plus one) paradoxes of trust.

Paradox 1: Knowing and trusting: when does trust begin?

In order to trust someone, you need to know them: however,
you cannot know someone without trusting them first.

The implication of this paradox is that trust requires a leap of faith that obliges one side to give the benefit of the doubt to a relatively unknown and ‘unproven’ person. While partial mitigation can take views and assessments from other interested parties, such as relying on the word of family members, friends, colleagues or former partners, there is still a certain degree of embracing uncertainty through opening up a potential vulnerability to an unknown person or entity.

Paul Zak and his colleagues offer a neurobiological explanation of trust-building focused on the production of brain chemicals which affect behaviour: when someone shows you trust, it results in the release of oxytocin in the brain, triggering an urge to reciprocate. Oxytocin is a neuropeptide that plays a key role in social attachment and affiliation in non-human mammals, and also causes an increase in trust amongst humans – thereby greatly increasing the benefits from social interaction. Ultimately, the response to trust and the reciprocity that it fosters create a perpetual trust-building cycle. None the less, trust still relies on either party initiating the dynamics of unconditional offering of their blind trust, and thereby corroborating that only trust begets trust.

Paradox 2: Balancing potential success and vulnerability

Ambition for greater success exposes enhanced vulnerabilities.

In order to build stronger relationships and achieve through greater partnerships and alliances, one must embrace new and untested opportunities, thereby exposing oneself to potentially fresh vulnerabilities. The confidence of aiming at new targets and delivering innovative achievements is thus tempered by the additional vulnerabilities that emerge from the relationships and the dependencies that underpin and support the dynamics required to make the new achievements materialise.

Arnold Relman, former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, identified a similar tension within science and research. ‘It seems paradoxical’, he pondered, ‘that scientific research, in many ways one of the most questioning and sceptical of human activities, should be dependent on personal trust. But the fact is that without trust, the research enterprise could not function.’

Indeed, human achievement and social development are predicated on such reliance that allows alliance, cooperation, partnership and collaboration to underpin growth and sustain achievement. Ironically, in order to become bigger and stronger, we seem to need to allow ourselves to become more vulnerable: indeed, the stronger we are, the more the vulnerabilities and dependencies that we may be harbouring …

Paradox 3: Difficult to build; but easy to destroy

Trust takes a significant effort to build over long time; but,
it can be irredeemably destroyed in an instant.

Effort is not proportional to achievement; instead it depends on the stage of the relationship. Once trust is lost, it is practically impossible to re-establish. It can take very little effort to derail years of established relationship through a minor detail, a divergent viewpoint or a misunderstanding. Put differently, the evidence required to distrust something, even after it had been held in trust for a significant period, appears to be less demanding and less conclusive. A single incident, a minor failure or a minute breach of confidence or trust can set back the most dedicated relationship or partnership and jeopardise future cooperation.

Moreover, such feelings carry over from one incident or domain to other facets of life, impacting on the way partners and collaborators are perceived in other arenas:

Whoever is careless with the truth in small matters cannot be trusted with important matters.

Albert Einstein

Paradox 4: Me versus us: here comes everybody else

Without trusting others we could not function as a society; however, being overly reliant and trustful could also jeopardise our potential prosperity and relative safety.

Teamwork and cooperation bring other individuals into the conversation. Success is thus devolved from the individual to the wider group or community that they inhabit. The relationships they form become essential to the continued survival and thriving of the wider community. Such reliance on others opens up new vulnerabilities.

When we build teams, organisations and supply chains we become dependent on all parts of the network or the chain. The failure of one agent in a tightly knit and well-connected supply chain can derail the entire network, as other participants who have lost particular capabilities and connections through the normal functioning of the network are suddenly forced to look for alternative means of completing their network and replacing the missing agent. Following a long partnership, partners may discover that certain skills that have been outsourced to others may have been lost and connections with alternative suppliers or clients may no longer exist. Our communities of trust and cooperation may thus bind us into different structures and arrangements that may make us more vulnerable over time as we increasingly learn to rely on others.

Paradox 5: More trust but less trusting

As the ambitions of modern society become more demanding, trust is increasingly essential in realising the achievements and targets required to make those ambitions come true; yet, trust in institutions, leaders and even experts, is eroding at an unprecedented rate.

While we need to build more trust in order to achieve increasingly ambitious common goals, we seem to be witnessing a societal retreat from awarding trust to representatives, experts and change agents. An increasingly sceptical public is challenging authority and is increasingly too resentful to put its trust in governments, non-governmental organisations, commercial organisations, news services, educational establishments, polling organisations and dedicated interest groups. People increasingly say they can no longer trust our public services, trains, doctors, scientists, banks, newspapers, politicians and even religious figures.

Such a perceived crisis of trust can have a significant impact on the institutions we have built through trust, potentially destabilising society, democracy, individual freedoms and the support structures and assets we have toiled to create on a shared basis. Unless we can regain the lost trust through greater scrutiny, visibility, accountability and control, we may yet emerge less protected, less involved and less able to respond, thrive and prosper in our wider groups and communities.

The ultimate trust paradox: to trust is to risk

Perhaps the biggest underlying paradox is that to trust, which implies a pining for safety and protection, is to risk, to open up, to become in some ways more exposed, vulnerable and dependent. The quality which enables us to achieve more in groups also makes us more dependent on the wider group and the individuals with whom we interact. Under some extreme conditions, the kryptonite of trust can deprive us of the special powers that come from belonging, sharing and colluding with a wider community, leaving us more exposed and vulnerable to some potential scenarios of accident and exploitation.

Developing different viewpoints

One part of the answer is to develop a moral compass that can account for multiple parties and interests that make up every partnership and collaboration.

British army officer Robert Baden-Powell, who provided the inspiration to the world Scout Movement, asserted that ‘trust should be the basis for all our moral training’.

Trust implies a deeper recognition of the parties we interact with. In projects and programmes it necessitates a deeper need to engage with stakeholders, define the expected benefits and work on outlining and supporting the relationships and on recognising, advertising and promoting the expectations of all involved parties.

Following the exploration of the paradoxes, we can develop an alternative description of trust: if we accept the core implication of trust, as a willingness to become vulnerable through deeper interconnectivity, we also recognise that it bears new types of risks. However, the increased vulnerability and interconnectivity require a more intimate understanding of the potential cooperation and its intended impacts and implications.

To account for the behaviour of organisations, partnerships and other collaborative arrangements there is a need to identify mechanisms which are able to address multiple sets of concerns reflected in the reality of organisational or interpersonal life. Douglas Long and Ngaire Hunt’s contribution to this chapter offers a fresh perspective to address competing concerns and the multiplicity of perspectives. The chapter is derived from the book The Ethical Kaleidoscope: Values, Ethics and Corporate Governance by Douglas Long and Zivit Inbar, published by Routledge. It uses a construct of the ethical kaleidoscope developed in the book and applies it to the context of managing various types and arrangements of projects.

The work of Long and Inbar (2016) attempts to make sense of the multiple perspectives related to governance of all kinds of organisations. The research is informed by the challenges faced by company directors as they grapple with tensions and competing demands to lead organisations through the moral, ethical and operational challenges that are found in modern business environments.

The kaleidoscope offers a multi-lens perspective that can account for multiple views, values and issues, informing decision-making and governance structures by incorporating legal as well as moral considerations. Combining the perspectives of intuition, risks, processes and culture allows for a richer exploration of issues and implications, to encourage the adoption of a wider and better-informed perspective.

Return on trust

Russian playwright and master storyteller, Anton Chekhov, observed that ‘you must trust or believe in people or life becomes impossible’. Relying on others is important for all undertakings, and particularly so in modern endeavours which invok...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures and tables
• About the editor
• Notes on contributors
• Introduction: The challenge of change: Identifying new and improved theories for project management
• 1 Ethics
• 2 People
• 3 Requirements
• 4 Performance
• 5 Anti-fragility
• 6 Strategic initiatives
• 7 Governance
• 8 Change
• 9 Commercial management
• Index