Cosmos

Mo’Better Risk — Tournaments and Games of Failure Part II

My last post discussed economic tournaments and games of failure in how they describe the success and failure of companies, with a comic example for IT start-up companies.  Glen Alleman at his Herding Cats blog has a more serious response in handily rebutting those who believe that #NoEstimates, Lean, Agile, and other cult-like fads can overcome the bottom line, that is, apply a method to reduce inherent risk and drive success.  As Glen writes:

“It’s about the money. It’s always about the money. Many want it to be about them or their colleagues, or the work environment, or the learning opportunities, or the self actualization.” — Glen Alleman, Herding Cats

Perfectly good products and companies fail all the time.  Oftentimes the best products fail to win the market, or do so only fleetingly.  Just think of the roles of the dead (or walking dead) over the years:  Novell, WordPerfect, Visicalc, Harvard Graphics; the list can go on and on.  Thus, one point that I would deviate from Glen is that it is not always EBITDA.  If that were true then both Facebook and Amazon would not be around today.  We see tremendous payouts to companies with promising technologies acquired for outrageous sums of money, though they have yet to make a profit.  But for every one of these there are many others that see the light of day for a moment and then flicker out of existence

So what is going on and how does this inform our knowledge of project management?  For the measure of our success is time and money, in most cases.  Obviously not all cases.  I’ve given two cases of success that appeared to be failure in previous posts to this blog: the M1A1 Tank and the ACA.  The reason why these “failures” were misdiagnosed was that the agreed measure(s) of success were incorrect.  Knowing this difference, where, and how it applies is important.

So how do tournaments and games of failure play a role in project management?  I submit that the lesson learned from these observations is that we see certain types of behaviors that are encouraged that tend to “bake” certain risks into our projects.  In high tech we know that there will be a thousand failures for every success, but it is important to keep the players playing–at least it is in the interest of the acquiring organization to do so, and is in the public interest in many cases as well.  We also know that most IT projects by most measures–both contracted out and organic–tend to realize a high rate of failure.  But if you win an important contract or secure an important project, the rewards can be significant.

The behaviors that are reinforced in this scenario on the part of the competing organization is to underestimate the cost and time involved in the effort; that is, so-called “bid to win.”  On the acquiring organization’s part, contracting officers lately have been all too happy to award contracts they know to be too low (and normally out of the competitive range) even though they realize it to be significantly below the independent estimate.  Thus “buying in” provides a significant risk that is hard to overcome.

Other behaviors that we see given the project ecosystem are the bias toward optimism and requirements instability.

In the first case, bias toward optimism, we often hear project and program managers dismiss bad news because it is “looking in the rear view mirror.”  We are “exploring,” we are told, and so the end state will not be dictated by history.  We often hear a version of this meme in cases where those in power wish to avoid accountability.  “Mistakes were made” and “we are focused on the future” are attempts to change the subject and avoid the reckoning that will come.  In most cases, however, particularly in project management, the motivations are not dishonest but, instead, sociological and psychological.  People who tend to build things–engineers in general, software coders, designers, etc.–tend to be an optimistic lot.  In very few cases will you find one of them who will refuse to take on a challenge.  How many cases have we presented a challenge to someone with these traits and heard the refrain:  “I can do that.”?  This form of self-delusion can be both an asset and a risk.  Who but an optimist would take on any technically challenging project?  But this is also the trait that will keep people working to the bitter end in a failure that places the entire enterprise at risk.

I have already spent some bits in previous posts regarding the instability of requirements, but this is part and parcel of the traits that we see within this framework.  Our end users determine that given how things are going we really need additional functionality, features, or improvements prior to the product roll out.  Our technical personnel will determine that for “just a bit more effort” they can achieve a higher level of performance or add capabilities at marginal or tradeoff cost.  In many cases, given the realization that the acquisition was a buy-in, project and program managers allow great latitude in accepting as a change an item that was assumed to be in the original scope.

There is a point where one or more of these factors is “baked in” into the course that the project will take.  We can delude ourselves into believing that we can change the course of the trajectory of the system through the application of methods: Agile, Lean, Six Sigma, PMBOK, etc. but, in the end, if we exhaust our resources without a road map on how to do this we will fail.  Our systems must be powerful and discrete enough to note the trend that is “baked in” due to factors in the structure and architecture of the effort being undertaken.  This is the core risk that must be managed in any undertaking.  A good example that applies to a complex topic like Global Warming was recently illustrated by Neil deGrasse Tyson in the series Cosmos:

In this example Dr. Tyson is climate and the dog is the weather.  But in our own analogy Dr. Tyson can be the trajectory of the system with the dog representing the “noise” of periodic indicators and activity around the effort.  We often spend a lot of time and effort (which I would argue is largely unproductive) on influencing these transient conditions in simpler systems rather than on the core inertia of the system itself.  That is where the risk lies. Thus, not all indicators are the same.  Some are measuring transient anomalies that have nothing to do with changing the core direction of the system, others are more valuable.  These latter indicators are the ones that we need to cultivate and develop, and they reside in an initial measurement of the inherent risk of the system largely based on its architecture that is antecedent to the start of the work.

This is not to say that we can do nothing about the trajectory.  A simpler system can be influenced more easily.  We cannot recover the effort already expended–which is why even historical indicators are important.  It is because they inform our future expectations and, if we pay attention to them, they keep us grounded in reality.  Even in the case of Global Warming we can change, though gradually, what will be a disastrous result if we allow things to continue on their present course.  In a deterministic universe we can influence the outcomes based on the contingent probabilities presented to us over time.  Thus, we will know if we have handled the core risk of the system by focusing on these better indicators as the effort progresses.  This will affect its trajectory.

Of course, a more direct way of modifying these risks is to make systemic adjustments.  Do we really need a tournament-based system as it exists and is the waste inherent in accepting so much failure really necessary?  What would that alternative look like?

Sunday Web blogging on Tuesday — Finding Wisdom — Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan

Our televisions are alight with a new and updated version of the series Cosmos.  In the relatively short span of time since the airing of that original series, humankind’s knowledge about the universe has increased many fold.  What has not advanced as quickly is our ability to use that knowledge in healthy and productive ways that advance human flourishing.  The world is careening between extremes, of most importance at the moment, with Russia in a Back to the Future Soviet Union moment.

CarlSagan_NASA

Carl Sagan was not only a popularizer of science, mainly in the realm of astronomy, but also a first rate astronomer, astrophysicist, and cosmologist in his own right.  I first came upon him in 1967, as an eager 12 year old with a sometimes overpowering hunger for scientific knowledge, especially in the areas of astronomy, geology, and biology.  The book that sparked my lifetime interest and occasional formal education in the sciences, was Intelligent Life in the Universe, which he co-authored with I. S. Shklovskii.  What Dr. Sagan instilled in me from this one book was not to be afraid to ask questions–even those that on the surface may seem obvious or outlandish–and to imagine the possible alternatives elsewhere to the type of life found here on earth, given an extremely old and expansive universe that, despite the then popular TV program, Star Trek, would ensure that we would never be able to travel the stars to completely confirm our speculations, warp drive and all.  (At least, sadly, not in my lifetime).  The subtext to his message to a voraciously curious 12 year old was not to be afraid; that intellectual honesty and integrity is more important than societal acceptance of what are proper questions and knowledge, that sometimes asking those questions and then pursuing them will actually lead to real answers.

Writer Ann Druyan is also worthy of mention here because, probably more than anyone else, she contributed to making Carl Sagan the popularizer that he became. One of three writers for the first Cosmos series, she later married Sagan and became his associate, helping him write several books on the subject of the scientific method and critical thinking.  Most prominent of the works that she assisted in bringing to print is The Varieties of Scientific Experience. which consists of an edited version of a series of Sagan’s Gifford Lectures given in 1985.

The Gifford Lectures were established in the U.K. in 1888, and consist of the selection of a prominent thinkers to promote the study of what was called “natural theology” and are held at various Scottish universities. Over the years the lectures have hosted some of the most prominent scientists and thinkers of the time, including such notaries as Hannah Arendt, Freeman Dyson, William James, John Dewey, Albert Schweitzer, Niels Bohr, Arnold Toynbee, Iris Murdoch, J. B. S. Haldane, Werner Heisenberg, Roger Penrose, and many others.

“Natural theology” is a philosophical approach to theology that is very old.  It is the concept that, as opposed to “revealed” theology, that the best way to understand the nature of the creator is through reason and experience.  In the 19th century it became the hope of many individuals that the steady advance of scientific knowledge could be reconciled with theological belief.  Over time, especially in the lectures, it has become apparent that such a reconciliation is becoming less and less likely, unless the various revealed theological definitions of “god” is changed as a result of our knowledge.

In choosing the title of the book, Ann Druyan meant to harken back to William James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience, based on his own Gifford Lectures given in the years 1901 and 1902 at Edinburgh.  To James, the psychological study of religion and the religious experience was an important aspect in understanding human nature.  Religion in his definition included “the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine.”  Thus James’ definition is more expansive than that of a particular set of religious beliefs or dogma.  In our own time we would define James’ definition as “spirituality.” 

At the time that he gave his lectures, not unlike our own, the world was divided by dogmatic religious interpretations of “god” and those who considered such beliefs to be a type of psychological defect.  James proposed a different path, positing that the act of faith and revelation–whatever its basis–was an artifact of human nature that warranted study.  He thus advocated for a tolerant attitude to these beliefs, regardless of the fact that the originators may have been unhinged in some way, given that oftentimes a positive effect resulted.  The danger, of course, is as George Santayana wrote, that taking James’ approach too far leads to a “tendency to disintegrate the idea of truth, to recommend belief without reason and to encourage superstition.”  I think this critique goes too far in its misunderstanding of James’ American pragmatist views.  To James, these beliefs were of utility only so far as they advanced a good, which he would define as the health of the individual and society.

Thus we come to Sagan’s work.  Ann Druyan in the introduction to her husband’s book states: “My variation on James’s title is intended to convey that science opens the way to levels of consciousness that are otherwise inaccessible to us; that, contrary to our cultural bias, the only gratification that science denies to us is deception.”  The intent here is to extend and inform James’ work and to incorporate Santayana’s warning; that it is still possible to feel wonder and connectedness to creation while eschewing deception.  Among our contemporaries, the neuroscientist Sam Harris has followed this path of inquiry.  But, I think, Sagan’s lectures go farther in their intent and it is the same message that he conveyed to me as a curious 12 year old:  that there are no taboo questions, that all aspects of human experience are open to inquiry.  James opens us to this same line of inquiry from an earlier foundation in a form of language that is obscure to us today: that this includes all forms of human expression.  The recent work of Daniel Dennett has also explored this territory.

Sagan opens his lectures with the following passage:

The word “religion” comes from the Latin for “binding together,” to connect that which has been sundered apart. It’s a very interesting concept. And in this sense of seeking the deepest interrelations among things that superficially appear to be sundered, the objectives of religion and science, I believe, are identical or very nearly so. But the question has to do with the reliability of the truths claimed by the two fields and the methods of approach.
By far the best way I know to engage the religious sensibility, the sense of awe, is to look up on a clear night. I believe that it is very difficult to know who we are until we understand where and when we are. I think everyone in every culture has felt a sense of awe and wonder looking at the sky. This is reflected throughout the world in both science and religion. Thomas Carlyle said that wonder is the basis of worship. And Albert Einstein said, “I maintain that the cosmic religious feeling is the strongest and noblest motive for scientific research.” So if both Carlyle and Einstein could agree on something, it has a modest possibility of even being right….

He then explores the fear that lies at the root of most of our hopes that there is something more than ourselves; our mortality:

All that we have seen is something of a vast and intricate and lovely universe. There is no particular theological conclusion that comes out of an exercise such as the one we have just gone through. What is more, when we understand something of the astronomical dynamics, the evolution of worlds, we recognize that worlds are born and worlds die, they have lifetimes just as humans do, and therefore that there is a great deal of suffering and death in the cosmos if there is a great deal of life….and perhaps even intelligence is a cosmic commonplace, then it must follow that there is massive destruction, obliteration of whole planets, that routinely occurs, frequently, throughout the universe. Well, that is a different view than the traditional Western sense of a deity carefully taking pains to promote the well-being of intelligent creatures. It’s a very different sort of conclusion that modern astronomy suggests. There is a passage from Tennyson that comes to mind: “I found Him in the shining of the stars, / I mark’d Him in the flowering of His fields.” So far pretty ordinary. “But,” Tennyson goes on, “in His ways with men I find Him not…. Why is all around us here / As if some lesser god had made the world, / but had not force to shape it as he would…?”

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Taking the reality of the universe into account, he then leads to a new view of what constitutes spirituality by leading with the observations of Thomas Paine:

“From whence, then, could arise the solitary and strange conceit that the Almighty, who had millions of worlds equally dependent on his protection, should quit the care of all the rest, and come to die in our world because, they say, one man and one woman ate an apple? And, on the other hand, are we to suppose that every world in the boundless creation had an Eve, an apple, a serpent, and a redeemer?”
Paine is saying that we have a theology that is Earth-centered and involves a tiny piece of space, and when we step back, when we attain a broader cosmic perspective, some of it seems very small in scale. And in fact a general problem with much of Western theology in my view is that the God portrayed is too small. It is a god of a tiny world and not a god of a galaxy, much less of a universe…. If a Creator God exists, would He or She or It or whatever the appropriate pronoun is, prefer a kind of sodden blockhead who worships while understanding nothing? Or would He prefer His votaries to admire the real universe in all its intricacy? I would suggest that science is, at least in part, informed worship.

In the final lecture Sagan then explains clearly why there are no bad questions that seek understanding:

If Newton were restricted, in working through the theory of gravitation, to apples and forbidden to look at the motion of the Moon or the Earth, it is clear he would not have made much progress. It is precisely being able to look at the effects down here, look at the effects up there, comparing the two, which permits, encourages, the development of a broad and general theory. If we are stuck on one planet, if we know only this planet, then we are extremely limited in our understanding even of this planet. If we know only one kind of life, we are extremely limited in our understanding even of that kind of life. If we know only one kind of intelligence, we are extremely limited in knowing even that kind of intelligence. But seeking out our counterparts elsewhere, broadening our perspective, even if we do not find what we are looking for, gives us a framework in which to understand ourselves far better.
I think if we ever reach the point where we think we thoroughly understand who we are and where we came from, we will have failed. I think this search does not lead to a complacent satisfaction that we know the answer, not an arrogant sense that the answer is before us and we need do only one more experiment to find it out. It goes with a courageous intent to greet the universe as it really is, not to foist our emotional predispositions on it but to courageously accept what our explorations tell us.