Projects and Complexity

Francesco Varanini, Walter Ginevri, Francesco Varanini, Walter Ginevri

• Publisher: Auerbach Publications
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781466562325
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Industrial Management
• Index: Business

Helpful to those tasked with managing complex environments, Projects and Complexity introduces a new way of looking at projects and fostering the culture needed to achieve sustainable results. It brings together experts from the academic, military, and business worlds to explore project management in the context of complexity theory and organizatio

1

Complexity in Projects: A Humanistic View

Francesco Varanini

CONTENTS

Project

Project Squeezed On A Plane

Project Submitted To Control

Project Manager’s Role

Fear And Self-Deceit

Complexity

Project Management Beyond Management

Project Manager as a Storyteller

Best Of Possible Projects: Leaning Tower Of Pisa

Leaning Tower Lesson

Mother of All Projects: Tower of Babel According to Dante

Project Manager as a Substitute for the Absent God and the Project as Tower, or: Praise of Imperfection

Time of the Project

Chrónos Versus Kairós

State of the Atmosphere

Robert Fitzroy: Project as a Journey and a Scientific Expedition

Robert Fitzroy: Forecasting the Weather

Barometer and Reading of Uncertainty

Weather Report, Weather Book

Captain Mcwhirr Reads The Weather Book

Forecast

A Pakistani Paper Mill and a Poetic, but Tragic, Accident

Albert Hirschman: Advantages of Under-Estimating

Principle of the “Hiding Hand”

What is at Stake?

Lumen Versus Lux: Stakeholders, Cones of Light, and Project Ethics

Attitudes Before the Project

Working on the Project Means Bearing One’s Cross

Working on the Project is Like Being God

Working on the Project Means Building One Stone Over the Other

Working On A Project Means Casting Bread Upon The Waters

Convergence, Presence, Experience

Tools for Project Governance

References

Project

The Latin prefix pro-, “forward,” points to an Indo-European conception to which we owe the front, or “prow” of the boat as well: progress: “to walk forward”; process: the steps of those who pro (forward) and cede (ceed, give way without opposing any resistance); produce: “to bring forward,” “to bring out”; program: “written beforehand”; planning: “designing on a plane surface”; prophecy, too: “foretelling.”

The project is part of the same context: from the Latin pro-jacere, “to throw forward, to project,” to throw an arrow or a spear, in the way we throw dice. This expression reaches every language, even faraway ones: in Japanese it is called purojekut, through the French language. Projecter is found at the beginning of the fifteenth century. In the middle of the sixteenth century project replaces the former pourget.

A few years later, in 1553, in the Giornale dell’assedio di Montalcino (Journal of the Montalcino Siege) we find the word used in Italian for the first time. The meaning is not strictly the current one yet; progetto standing for “indefinite or peculiar plan, hardly feasible.” Only at the end of the sixteenth century does to plan become “devising a plan and find ways of carrying it out.” But at last in the nineteenth century the verb speaks exactly of “designing a building, making calculations and plans for its execution.” And yet (at the end of the twentieth century) purists of the Italian language oppose the expression. For once they are not completely wrong: unlike all other languages, the Italian words progettare and progetto only partially convey the Latin and French meanings.

The English project, the German projekt, the Russian proekt, the Spanish proyecto, the Portuguese projeto: in all languages this expression still conveys the sense of “casting” something, therefore that of giving out rays of light or “reproducing images on a screen.” A single word, a single verb, expresses at the same time a military, geometric, psychological, and cinematographic idea. In Italian, on the contrary, the idea of project has been divided in two: on one side we have proiettare, proiezione (to project, projection) and on the other side progettare, progetto (to plan, project). Therefore—even though it is wise, when possible, to express ideas in a maternal language, not a merely technical one, a language making sense in everyday life too—when one wants to refer to “project” in the proper full sense, the use of the English word project is better: because I am not just planning, as we would say in Italian. I am also projecting myself into the future into a place that never existed before. I’m casting a projectile toward a target I cannot see.

The project, devoid of the idea of projection, missing its analogy with the projectile, removed from the image of the spear and the arrow, deprived of the idea of a light cone cast on a dark place, of the heart put into every effort, could appear to have lost its meaning, lacking emotion, a merely technical, abstract, faraway matter. Not so useful, and ineffective.

Project Squeezed On A Plane

The French language, in the sixteenth century, starts using plan, from the Latin planum, Indo-European root pela- (flat, outstretched), with the meaning of “something represented on a flat surface.” Hence in the seventeenth century, the Italian and English words: in this language, the verb (planning) gains ground.

But the sociological and economic meaning goes back to much closer times: The Twenties of the past century: the economic cycles of the laissez-faire market deteriorate in an out-of control crisis, and the answer is sought through economic politics and target-oriented development projects. Thus the Soviet Union, in 1921 sets up the Gosplan, Gosudarstvennaja Planovaja Komissija (State Planning Commission), and in 1929 the first Five-Year Plan is launched. In the same years, Western economies (as in Roosevelt’s New Deal) look for a new agreement between social partners: this agreement will have to become, here as well, a plan based on the persuasion (or conceit) of being able to direct the economy toward pre-established goals. The Economist, in its March 30, 1935 issue, indeed writes that if private companies clearly failed in taking the right steps, then “planning” must be tried, a new expression the journalist writes, with reason, in quotes.

It is surely useful, and maybe essential, to write programs (in Greek progràphein, “writing before”) or documents when the decision as to how to face the future is taken, in which one explains—to those who made demands, to those who will have to bear the expenses, in general to all those concerned—what will be done.

Planning, a schematic and brief but also not exhaustive representation of the future, is of great use. Indeed, as soon as an image of the future is put down in writing, one must remember that the future is still unknown, and that our possibilities of preordaining it are limited; our ability of directing development one way or another depends on variables totally beyond our possibility of control.

On the contrary, sometimes we prefer not to see. Fear of future negative events is fought by giving a preliminary definition of what the future will have to be. So the future is not “what will be” but what I decide today will be tomorrow. We don’t accept, in doing so, the future for its novelty: it won’t be possible to accept unexpected aspects of the future as blessings, as riches, because the future will be under control, that is, compared with the forecasting I am doing today.

In other words, using planning in a defensive way, the project is debased; the project, squeezed on the plane surface, considered as a predetermination of the future, is liberated from uncertainty. But it is also deprived of essential aspects: hope, dreams, and novelty.

Project Submitted To Control

And afterwards, the reduction of the project in the plan opens the way to another, even more dangerous reduction: control.

In France, in the thirteenth century, the rôle is the “register”: the list of the members of an organization, the description of some proceedings. How to check that the contents of the register exactly reproduce reality? Making another registration, keeping a counterregister, a contre-rôle. The verb contreroller is then coined (as in French, in Middle-Ages Latin: contrarotulus, contrarotulare). Hence in English, as early as the fifteenth century, control.

Control is certainly a useful activity. Checking registrations, making sure that the number of subordinates, the costs, and the revenues have been correctly calculated, is dutiful and necessary. As long as the limits of control are not forgotten: the behavior under the close examination of control is not the best behavior that is possible. It is only the behavior conforming to the rule. This is why sometimes orientation to control rewards the worst management: it rewards those who, hiding behind conformity to the rule, avoid assuming any responsibility and do not catch hold of opportunities for improvement.

We should also remember that the rule (translation of the Latin norma) is useful, even required, in an organizational, administrative, and accounting context. It’s more difficult, more dangerous, to consider the rule, therefore the “normal behavior,” as required inside a project. Norma (hence “norm”) is Latin for “squadron, team.” Exquadrare means “to reduce to a square shape.” In this case, to the implicit compression on the plane, the representation through a one-dimensional image, a further compression is added: the shape the object I have in mind might take doesn’t matter; the only shape I consider is the square one.

No one denies the necessity of “squaring accounts.” Possibly the regular management of a company may be subjected to a single shape, maybe oriented to squaring. But if we have in mind the project, something complex and multiform, its one-dimensional, one-linear representation can but appear reductive.

Submitting a project to control means comparing what we are doing with a program, a document “written before.” In this way of considering a project, the attention to the construction part, to the invention, to the discovery of something that wasn’t there before, is limited to the starting phase. The “time for the project,” the time we grant ourselves to look at the unknown, in which we afford to imagine what isn’t there, is over very soon. The written descriptions of the “things to do” end it.

From this point on, following what has been written and signed, one executes and carries out what is “prescribed.” One expects all activities to consist of what is described in a detailed comprehensive picture drawn beforehand, and only in that. One expects activities to be carried out in that sequence, keeping to the calendar defined earlier. Any deviation from the course previously outlined is considered a flaw; any variance is something that will require a justification.

One thinks again, goes back to the initial thought and modifies it, only if it’s essential. As if thinking and working were two activities not to be carried out together, as if, in order to start carrying out the work required to bring the project to a positive conclusion, thinking should be stopped. A project so reductively intended is born with the hand brake on. Tied to the starting point, the project will be turned backward instead of looking ahead.

Project Manager’s Role

When a project is conceived in the light of planning control, when a project is divided into an initial phase of planning and a second phase of realization, the project manager is first of all considered the person responsible for its execution. The project manager takes in his hands a project already defined as to its preliminary scope (which is its target) a project already constrained (as to predetermined time and cost), and engenders, from a practical and material point of view, its execution.

I nevertheless believe experience and self-awareness, an awareness of the actual substance of work he’s carrying out, will help the project manager realize his work isn’t restricted to his overseeing its execution. Because, more than anyone else, the project manager is aware that the muddle can be clarified in several ways. He knows that “the way of doing things” finally adopted almost never coincides with what had been seen beforehand. He knows that the definition of aims and the execution cannot actually be conducted separately. He knows a plan always contains many imperfections and that only later will the way of putting them right be discovered. He knows no one can possibly declare when and how a project can reasonably be considered completed.

For this reason, I think, any project manager feels an uncomfortable loss of contact with reality when he’s compelled to devote himself to the compilation of documents containing detailed estimates of what is unpredictable, when he has to write down detailed calendars of what will be done every day for years to come, and when he has to draw up on paper an accurate comparison between what was foreseen and what has been done, and when he has to state the exact measurement of how much of a project has already been executed.

The attention to planning and control is only right: nevertheless, treading this road means deviating from the project. Here is where, I believe, the annoyance and frustration originate: so much time, so much attention devoted to cultivating a fetishist image of the project. The center of attention is not the project anymore. In the place of the project, entangled and partially obscure, yet alive, there is a simplified image, a fetish removed from the projection, from the eyes looking ahead, from hope, from the dream of what we undertook to realize; a fetish removed from what customers and all stakeholders involved in the project expected; a fetish removed from the actual project, the one lived through day by day by those who work on it. One ends up by worshipping an image, by working around a project that isn’t there; one ends up by moving inside an illusory reality.

Annoyance and frustration are born from this awareness: how much wasted energy! What a great amount of time used simply to square things on paper. What a lot of attention diverted from the project in its full reality. And all this is because one is held prisoner by a linear idea of a project, because to face its complexity one looks for simplification, and because all available tools are directed to the definition of the goal, once and for all: to “secure” it. And what’s more, they are control-oriented.

Fear And Self-Deceit

This behavior, I think, depends on our being faced, when considering the very idea of a project, with a complex situation, with a set heavy with uncertainties and risks, with a muddle of thoughts and actions that can only generate anxiety and fear.

Faced with this muddle, we choose to substitute the reality of things (we actually don’t know what will happen and how to act in order to reach the goal) with a simplified image, a one-dimensional image, flattened on a plane. And on that plane, is a s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• List of Editors
• List of Contributors
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 Complexity in Projects
• Chapter 2 A Philosopher of Science’s Opinion
• Chapter 3 Testimonies and Complexity
• Chapter 4 The Shared Vision as a Change Engine
• Chapter 5 Self-Organized Project Management
• Chapter 6 The Project beyond WBS
• Chapter 7 Stakeholders’ Worlds
• Chapter 8 The Propitious Time
• Chapter 9 Leadership and Complexity
• Chapter 10 Narrating to Believe
• Chapter 11 Risk and Complexity
• Chapter 12 The Value of Redundancy
• Chapter 13 An Ongoing Journey
• Index