Project Management – Ambiguity in leadership

A lot of business enterprise activities and projects go badly wrong. In fact, if you believe the stats, about 50% of major corporate projects end up as a fiasco.

Some people argue that in reality, that figure is much higher but a lot of the big-name organizations don’t like washing their dirty linen in public and never own up in the event that they had just spent millions of dollars on a debacle.

Those failures can be broadly seen as coming under one of two major categories:

• projects that deliver precisely zip after huge sums have been spent on them;

• those that do deliver something but whatever it is, it subsequently proves to be a huge disappointment and never pays back the sums spent developing it in the first place.

Why things happen

If you took all the reports and books about why projects go wrong and stacked them up, you would probably have a tower reaching from here to Mars.

Those postmortem make interesting reading but one thing you will see prominently outlined, again and again, is the problem of poor leadership structures.
Up until round about 20 years ago, things on projects were relatively straightforward. There was an essentially a hierarchical structure where roles and responsibilities were clearly defined, as were associated authorities for taking certain types of decision.

Inevitably this was something of a pyramidal structure with the project manager sitting at the top. The PM reported to the sponsor or executive board and was charged with delivery of whatever the activity happen to be. If anything went wrong, he or she was held accountable.

It was old-fashioned and by today’s standards, politically incorrect, because it gave people a degree of authority to do their job and clarity also as to who was in charge of what. So, that was self-evidently argument enough for tearing it down and replacing it with something that had been proven in many different environments to be a total waste of time – i.e. matrix management.

The origins

Whatever the books tell you about the intellectual and philosophical origins of matrix management, the reality is that it and its related philosophies really took off in the mid-1970s when a lot of people who probably were previously hippies, decided to migrate into people development roles within commerce and industry.

Suddenly, instead of getting on with the job, people found themselves sitting on cushions in a circle on the floor, being told they had to share their life experiences and deepest worries with their colleagues.

Someone thought that this might help (e.g.) the company to find better ways to build its electrical motors for small domestic appliances.

Of course, as everybody is now sitting on the floor declaring publicly how much they love all their colleagues in the team, it’s but a short logical step to start encouraging the despising of the idea of authority and single-point decision-making. After all, why should anyone be seen as having more authority to make decisions than anyone else? Isn’t that undemocratic?

So, out of these mutual admiration societies sprang the idea that everyone will be entitled to have a say on every decision and to share in making it.
Eastern verses western philosophies

This as an idea had been practiced for some time in Far Eastern business, notably in Japan.

However, in the U.S. and other western countries, the idea of encouraging people to contribute opinion, irrespective of their hierarchical position in the company, was badly confused with the idea that the originator had the same authority levels as more senior personnel.

So, the concept of the work-group was born and its associated workshop.

What this meant was large groups of people being gathered together to try and map out a way forward, with outcomes being voted upon. The crazed thinking behind this and which to some extent still continues today, is that direction should be decided based upon consensus rather than on an individual’s vision and decision making capabilities.

The logic is that if everybody supports the decision, as being the consensus product of the democratic process, then they’ll buy into it more readily and successful outcomes are more likely to be delivered.

Of course, it’s absolute nonsense in most cases and astonishing success or turnaround stories like Ford and Apple are strong testimony.

Projects today

Although things have softened down a bit from the heyday of everyone trying to love each other to death in a work team, nevertheless, project structures now are frequently extremely difficult to define on paper as hierarchies are officially discouraged.

That means that decision-making is sluggish and many project managers have lost any confidence in the organization’s support for them if they have to make fast tough calls that subsequently don’t work out.

In passing, it also means that issues are constantly falling between the gaps and not being dealt with, as exact responsibility definition and demarcations are frowned upon and deliberately left vague to avoid offending people through visibly showing authorities on an organization chart.

What’s now more likely is that decisions with be ducked and a ‘working group’ will be convened, where a lot of hot air will be generated (with associated delays) prior to a consensus being reached.

The lack of clear unambiguous roles, structures and authorities within project teams, leads at best to confusion and at worse chaos and decision-avoidance. Still, if nothing now happens due to decisions being missed or seriously delayed, at least we can say that the problem was collective and not the fault of any one person.

So, things are a lot better clearly.

Learning from history

One of the most enduring and successful human organizational structures is that of the world’s military.

Nobody’s suggesting that project teams need uniforms or to go around saluting each other but there is one important lesson that can be learned from the armed services throughout history. That is –“ambiguity of command is the first step on the road to disaster”.

That’s as true today as it was for the ancient Romans 2000 years ago. So, why on projects today do we work hard to blur just who’s in charge, who is authorized to make what decisions and who is responsible for what?

Could it be that our ancestors knew a few things about successfully achieving objectives that we’re in danger of forgetting?

 

Mani Masood

A seasoned professional in IT, Cybersecurity, and Applied AI, with a distinguished career spanning over 20+ years. Mr. Masood is highly regarded for his contributions to the field, holding esteemed affiliations with notable organizations such as the New York Academy of Sciences and the IEEE – Computer and Information Theory Society. His career and contributions underscores his commitment to advancing research and development in technology.

Mani Masood

A seasoned professional in IT, Cybersecurity, and Applied AI, with a distinguished career spanning...