Comments on: Circular Logic in Project Management http://www.pavley.com/2009/08/25/circular-logic-in-project-management/ “A great leap in the dark” – Thomas Hobbes Mon, 17 May 2010 19:27:50 -0700 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.6 hourly 1 By: pav http://www.pavley.com/2009/08/25/circular-logic-in-project-management/comment-page-1/#comment-45 pav Thu, 01 Oct 2009 14:22:00 +0000 http://www.pavley.com/?p=43#comment-45 Hey, thanks for the comment! I'll check out Mr Pink but you make a good point about the conflict of the individual's goals with the company's goals. I think it's a separate problem in this tangled web of managing projects but a good one to address. Hey, thanks for the comment! I’ll check out Mr Pink but you make a good point about the conflict of the individual’s goals with the company’s goals. I think it’s a separate problem in this tangled web of managing projects but a good one to address.

]]> By: Andrey Fedorov http://www.pavley.com/2009/08/25/circular-logic-in-project-management/comment-page-1/#comment-40 Andrey Fedorov Tue, 29 Sep 2009 00:51:09 +0000 http://www.pavley.com/?p=43#comment-40 It's an interesting metaphor to say that recursion or circular reasoning is to blame for people's inability to see their own mistakes, but that model doesn't seem to provide a lot of detail about what kind of solutions exist to "failure blindness". A slightly more concrete model I like is one explained by Daniel Pink: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrkrvAUbU9Y I like his model because it explains why certain kinds of blindness go on in corporate life to a greater degree than, say, various community organizations, like churches, or open source projects (they have a variety of other problems, I'm more interested in isolating the ones in a corporate environment). In a corporate environment, I see two major contributing causes. Firstly, in the fashion of a typical prisoner's dilemma, while recognizing a failed strategy quickly and backtracking is good for the company, it's disastrous for an individual - individual goals do not align with collective goals. Secondly, and more relavent to the original question, a focus on personal success narrows one's attention to things that are going well, and ignoring the inefficiencies and failures. This forms an insidious combination of survival bias (as long as there were any successes, one ignores mistakes) and functional fixedness in regard to plans - when projects become a strategy to be executed, rather than a hypothesis to be tested, one ignores their function: not that of predicting the future, but of inventing it. It’s an interesting metaphor to say that recursion or circular reasoning is to blame for people’s inability to see their own mistakes, but that model doesn’t seem to provide a lot of detail about what kind of solutions exist to “failure blindness”.

A slightly more concrete model I like is one explained by Daniel Pink:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrkrvAUbU9Y

I like his model because it explains why certain kinds of blindness go on in corporate life to a greater degree than, say, various community organizations, like churches, or open source projects (they have a variety of other problems, I’m more interested in isolating the ones in a corporate environment).

In a corporate environment, I see two major contributing causes. Firstly, in the fashion of a typical prisoner’s dilemma, while recognizing a failed strategy quickly and backtracking is good for the company, it’s disastrous for an individual – individual goals do not align with collective goals. Secondly, and more relavent to the original question, a focus on personal success narrows one’s attention to things that are going well, and ignoring the inefficiencies and failures. This forms an insidious combination of survival bias (as long as there were any successes, one ignores mistakes) and functional fixedness in regard to plans – when projects become a strategy to be executed, rather than a hypothesis to be tested, one ignores their function: not that of predicting the future, but of inventing it.

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