I love to write and talk about Project Management… uhm, Leadership… or “The Thing That A Project Manager Does To Move His Project In The Proper Direction, Related To People“.

I want to share new and exciting stuff and hope it challenges your thinking, enhances your mental flexibility and provides you with useful information.

I really appreciate the audience (hi!). Although I sometimes say things excited and full of passion (“you need to…”), it’s always an invitation to look at the information and consider it for your own use. If you like it, great! If you have no use for it, that’s cool too. Because I appreciate you, as my readers.

Luckily for me, the internet is a huge place, I mean, BIG! From billions of people, a handful of them (hi!) take the time to read my ideas and thoughts about “The Thing That A PM…”

I need an audience to share my thoughts. So does everyone.

But what if I tried to do my thing limited to one building with one Project Manager? The chance that this one PM likes talking about Bobsleds and Pirate Ships are zero. And even if, one person is not an audience. (yeah, yeah, I should learn humility… I know).

I either stop doing my thing. Or I look outside the building. Or I turn into myself and become weird.

If you want to nurture information leadership (calling it “thought leadership” would be too much, would it?), you have to make sure there is a big enough audience. Keeping things limited to one part of the organization might be counterproductive sometimes, just because of this reason.

What I recommend (kindly suggest) is to go through this presentation about Knowledge Management in Enterprise 2.0. It explains why knowledge sharing in most companies doesn’t work. Hint: this is the exact same argument, but better presented.

Bas de Baar helps people find ways to enjoy the diversity of human interaction in their organizations so that they can get out of their own way and achieve their goals. - Size Matters: Without Enough Audience, No Leaders is a post from: Project Shrink.

This post is an early draft of a concept I am working on. It will focus on the supply and demand of information to nodes in social networks. People have a need for information (demand), some people have a need for an audience for their information (supply). I will use the notion of leaders (supply) and followers (demand). Inherent to social networks is the fact that you have way more followers than leaders. The system maintains this balance. Problems occur when boundaries make it difficult to ensure this balance.

Image by James Cridland.

Yes, this is a simplification of reality. It’s a model. It’s not The Real World… argh … don’t get me started about The Real World.

It needs references. It needs some examples and clarification. I am working on that. But I also was kind of hoping on your feedback

20% Holds 80% Of Information

Within social networks information is not distributed equally. A few have a lot. A lot have few. I think that information follows a Pareto distribution: 80% of the information is held by or accessible from 20% of the people.

When looking at the flow of information in organizations, you will find the existence of a few hubs: nodes in the network that are highly connected. In organizations not everyone has a relationship with every other employee. There are a couple of employees that know a lot of people, and most people in the organization know these few so-called “hubs”, leaders in information brokerage.

In networks you find many more followers than leaders.

In human networks you’ll find more people listening than speaking. Looking at the online world, we’ll see the 90-9-1 principle, which says that “in a community, the rule of thumb is that 90% of visitors only view the content, 9% only comment or react to it, and 1% create it.” Few people create, lots of people consume.

A person can be a leader and a follower at the same time, but for different topics. Leading in Project Management and following in SOA technology.

This is not some evil plot. It’s inherent to the social system.

From the information input perspective, you don’t want to be swamped in information. You limit the amount of sources. You want these few sources to be “the best”. “The best” being measured in popular demand skews the choice of information hubs towards a limited few. You want your sources easy to find, which also turns you to the more popular hubs. It’s similar to “the rich get richer”. If you are a popular hub, you become even more popular.

From the information output side you get a similar view. Leaders need demand for their information. A higher demand means larger influence, more recognition, a larger reputation. Leaders will behave to maximize the amount of followers. They need to be a very small minority.

Leaders are born with this urge. You really want to be a hub.

Within social networks there is a balance for the distribution of leaders and followers. There is an “natural amount” of hubs within a network.

Blue Ocean, Red Ocean

Once a follower has found a good source, it will remain connected as long as the need for the information exists. The relationship from follower-to-leader remains mainly stable.

What does a leader do without followers? It’s going to look for them throughout the network. Hubs move around to stay hubs.

For example, a couple of years ago a blog about Project Management was almost alone in its category. You could have quite a following with your blog. As more and more blogs come into existence about this topic, it gets harder and harder to build up your audience. Lot of leaders and not enough followers. An imbalance between supply and demand of information.

So, hubs start to move. They are leaving the red ocean, in search for a blue one. “Blue Ocean Strategy” is a business strategy book written by Kim and Mauborgne, that promotes creating new market space or “Blue Ocean” rather than competing in an existing crowded industry (Red Ocean).

In the case of Project Management blogs, you are trying to differentiate yourself. Looking for a different or more specific niche. Change the medium by adding video, audio and presentations. Looking for your fresh, blue ocean.

Next up:

What happens when boundaries prohibit movement and a leader cannot move throughout the network? What if you shrink to ocean into a pond (moving from organization to project)?

Bas de Baar helps people find ways to enjoy the diversity of human interaction in their organizations so that they can get out of their own way and achieve their goals. - Leaders And Followers In Social Networks is a post from: Project Shrink.

The Second Turn of “The Four Dharmas Of Project Management” is titled “Structure For Resilience”. In this view a project is a human system working towards a desired goal. However, the project is running within an environment that is changing continuously. The project needs ways to deal with these changes and still keep performing its function, that is, reaching the desired goal. The project needs “resilience”.

Structure For Resilience

“Resilience is… the ability to absorb disturbances, to be changed and then to re-organize and still have the same identity (retain the same basic structure and ways of functioning). It includes the ability to learn from the disturbance. A resilient system is forgiving of external shocks. As resilience declines the magnitude of a shock from which it cannot recover gets smaller and smaller. Resilience shifts attention from purely growth and efficiency to needed recovery and flexibility. Growth and efficiency alone can often lead ecological systems, businesses and societies into fragile rigidities, exposing them to turbulent transformation. Learning, recovery and flexibility open eyes to novelty and new worlds of opportunity.”

In complex adaptive systems (like a human system) an important concept that allows for adaptive capacity is “self organization”. According to Wikipedia: “Self-organization is a process in which the internal organization of a system, normally an open system, increases in complexity without being guided or managed by an outside source.”

In contrast to a traditional central plan-and-control organization this would allow for individuals to act fast upon changes in the environment, it would allocate the proper resources to a problem more efficiently. There is no central bottleneck for information which consumes time. There is no central point of decision that has only a fraction of the collective mental capacity.

Group Identity

But self-organization is only part of the story. For human interactions to work properly as a group, an identity is needed. If people want to be associated with the organization, self-organization becomes natural and very effective. The desire to be part of the group creates tremendous motivation, it creates a sense of trust (which allows for continuous and transparent communication), and fulfilling the identity creates alignment among the members.

If you have a hot cause with cool solutions that inspire people, motivated people will work hard to achieve the big audacious goal. They will love and respect everyone else working on the same cause. The similarity in interests will enhance trust, which will open up communication channels big time. The culture that emerges allows like-minded people on board and eliminates slackers. The overall goal will function as a beacon for all activities, it aligns the groups activities.

Continuous Transparent Feedback

A system always communicates with its environment and based upon the feedback it gets from it, alters its behavior. If a group of animals will drink water from a well and one of the groups dies because of it, they entire group may search for a different well. If a company introduces a new product, and sees its stock plummeting because of it, it might change its strategy.

It is therefor essential that the organization members get continuous feedback on their own performance and the environment. This is where the use of analytics, metrics and “in-your-face” information visualization comes in.

Second Turn Summarized

• Leadership provides big ambitious goals, it creates an identity that the organization members want to be associated with. It is all about creating Hot Causes and Cool Solutions. This creates motivation, this creates a cause, this bootstraps the creation of a specific culture.
• The team becomes self-organizing with the ambitious goal for alignment, and the emerging culture for “rules of interaction” within the group.
• The group identity creates trust, which creates proper communication.
• Metrics and analysis of the group performance and environment is used as a feedback loop directly into the team for self-organization.
• Transparency of communication ensures nobody is cheating the system.

Role Of Project Manager

• Bootstrap identity and culture
• Nurture identity and culture
• Nurture flow of information (continuous and transparent)

Tip: if you want to see what this effectively means for managing virtual teams I recommend this great presentation by Jessica Lipnack.

Bas de Baar helps people find ways to enjoy the diversity of human interaction in their organizations so that they can get out of their own way and achieve their goals. - Second Turn: Structure For Resilience is a post from: Project Shrink.

As a fundamental model for projects I want to use the notion of a Complex Adaptive System (CAS). In this post I will outline what this means; what are the properties of a CAS and how are they beneficial in our quest to search for answers to project problems?

Why CAS In The First Place?

I am the first to admit that my attention to the use of complex adaptive systems is largely triggered by its current popularity. It is a new and exciting concept that is getting more and more popular, and its associated attention, in almost every scientific discipline. It is this multi-disciplinary aspect in combination with new and exciting that sparked my interest.

The central thought that the interactions of a lot agents make up the behavior of the entire system, is similar to the opinions I hold when talking about projects: the interactions of all the individual stakeholders make up the behavior of the project. The fundamental idea resonates very well with my personal views on projects.

But only multiple agents that interact doesnt make a complex adaptive system:

“What distinguishes a CAS from a pure multi-agent system (MAS) is the focus on top-level properties and features like self-similarity, complexity, emergence and self-organization. A MAS is simply defined as a system composed of multiple, interacting agents. In CASs, the agents as well as the system are adaptive: the system is self-similar. A CAS is a complex, self-similar collectivity of interacting adaptive agents. Complex Adaptive Systems are characterized by a high degree of adaptive capacity, giving them resilience in the face of perturbation.” (source: Wikipedia)

These extra properties should bring something useful to the table. Otherwise we only introduce additional complexity (pun intended) without getting benefits in return.

So, we have:

• Self similarity
• Complexity
• Emergence
• Self-organization
• Adaptive capacity

I will turn to every aspect individually and discuss what it means and what benefits it brings in our modeling of projects.

(source image: Wikipedia.org)

Self similarity

“In mathematics, a self-similar object is exactly or approximately similar to a part of itself, e.g., the whole has the same shape as one or more of the parts.” (Source :Wikipedia)

For self-similarity to make sense in a project context, we have to include the following view:

• A project is a small organization
• An organization is a small society

Applying the concept of self-similarity this means that behavior and patterns of projects can be found in organizations and society. And vice versa, patterns seen in society can be found in projects. Every level of abstraction will have (near) identical properties, only the scale is different. If we look specifically to shapes of things (e.g. organizational, communication patterns) the concept of a fractal applies:

“… a fractal is “a rough or fragmented geometric shape that can be subdivided in parts, each of which is (at least approximately) a reduced-size copy of the whole” (Source: Wikipedia)

So, basically, self-similarity in geometric shapes. As emerging patterns are a very important part of interest in a CAS, and patterns are represented by shapes, the importance of fractals becomes clear:

“A fractal figure is a snapshot of a dynamic system at a stage of development. The snapshot is a clue to a dynamic process – a pattern of development.” (Source: Spectacle.org)

The self-similarity property allows is to apply concepts from society and general organizations directly to projects. If we are looking at why projects succeed or fail, we should find useful patterns in the discussions why societies in general succeed or fail.

Complexity

In a simple system you can easily see and predict how a system behaves. In a CAS you can absolutely forget that. The amount of variables that determine the path the system will take are immense and the slightest change in just one variable can set the system of in an entirely different direction (the famous butterfly-effect).

The good news is that using a CAS you can handle the vast amount of variables; the drawback is, the slightest deviation in start situation can change the course of a system dramatically, it is therefor indeterministic. This makes it useless for precise predictive powers about reality. But for our modest goal in modeling projects that is not a problem. The following quote sums it up perfectly:

“These authors re-emphasize in their conclusion their belief that such modeling is descriptively useful in explaining behavior, but that direct modeling is impossible. “Reviewing the selection of scenarios presented in this section, one summarizing remark should be made immediately. The extreme sensitivity of the dynamics to the initial conditions and numerical values prohibits any use… for predictive purposes….” (Source: Wcu.edu)

Emergence

“… emergence refers to the way complex systems and patterns, such as those that form a hurricane, arise out of a multiplicity of relatively simple interactions.” (Source: Wikipedia)

Self-organization

“Self-organization is a process in which the internal organization of a system, normally an open system, increases in complexity without being guided or managed by an outside source.” (Source: Wikipedia)

How the system organizes itself is part of the system. There is no need to have an external entity to take care of that. This makes the model of the CAS powerful, as it is self-contained in this respect. Even if you view projects as an artificially constructed system with dedicated structures, this doesnt mean that when viewing the project as stakeholder-interaction model the from the outside enforced structures prohibits self-organization. The property of self-organization enhances a systems adaptive capacity.

Adaptive capacity

A CAS has adaptive behavior (hence the name), which lets it work better in its environment. The adaptive capacity provides the system the much needed resilience in face of changes in the environment or the system itself.

Attractors

Attractors are not a property of complex systems, however it is a concept that plays a major role in its treatment. Systems will follow certain paths. Attractors help us to define where they are heading for.

“In dynamical systems, an attractor is a set in the phase space to which the system evolves after a long enough time. Phase space is the space in which all possible states of a system are represented, with each possible state of the system corresponding to one unique point in the phase space. A trajectory of the dynamical system in the attractor does not have to satisfy any special constraints except for remaining on the attractor. The trajectory may be periodic or chaotic or of any other type.” (Source: Wikipedia)

The state of a system is something that the one defining the system can determine. If you are discussing projects, we are free to define which states we want to consider. To give you some idea: if we consider communication patterns within the project team, we can have the situation that everybody communicates with everybody else (fully connected communication graph), or we can have the situation that everyone only communicates though the PM (graph looks like a wheel). The phase space can consist of the connectivity of the communication network.

Bas de Baar helps people find ways to enjoy the diversity of human interaction in their organizations so that they can get out of their own way and achieve their goals. - Projects As A Complex Adaptive System: Why Bother? is a post from: Project Shrink.