“If everybody has access to the right and real information, better and faster decisions would be made, right?

Transparency sounds like an awesome enabler for adaption. (…)

One drawback that makes transparency almost useless as an enabler for adaption. As the creator of resilience.

An example from a country where radical transparency is practiced for years in government, Sweden:

“But even as it takes its transparency laws for granted, Sweden has long debated whether absolute openness leads, paradoxically, to greater secrecy. In 2004 Inga-Britt Ahlenius, a Swede working on transparency issues within the United Nations, […] tried to review government files, she found only “empty boxes.” “The principle has come to discourage its original purpose,” she added. “It is quite logical: if you are concerned that things will be made immediately public, you do not write it on paper.””

(…)

In the situation that “transperancy” is most needed for resilience, it is the least effective.

That’s the transperancy paradox.

Follow this link to read the entire post.

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. - The Transparency Paradox. is a post from: Project Shrink.

Following are two strategies that can be used to align means. To provide you with some ideas. To start the discussion.

Patterning – Going Through The Motions

In essence, with this strategy the project team is told what the means are; the larger organization knows best. This idea originates from Jeff Sutherland in “Shock Therapy: Bootstrapping Hyperproductive Scrum”. If you have a new team that has no experience with Scrum, you will put a very experienced Scum Master in charge and he will set the rules. Relentlessly.

Only a few rules, that make up the basics of Scrum, but they have to be followed with strong discipline. The Scrum Master will make sure this happens.
Set the rules first, than, after a while, let go when it becomes natural. This is called “patterning”.

Continuous Transparent Feedback

A human 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 project members get continuous feedback on their own performance and the environment. This is where the use of analytics, metrics, “in-your-face” information visualization and plain old coaching comes in. By providing feedback to the team on how well they perform under the current project rule set, they will adapt to more effective means if needed.

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. - Two Strategies For Aligning Means is a post from: Project Shrink.

I already stopped watching television (except for Knight Rider). I only listen to non-stop music radio stations.

Sometimes it feels like being hosed down by information.

In the movie “What the Bleep Do We Know?” Andrew B Newberg, MD states:

“Our brain receives 400 billion bits/second of information, but we’re only aware of 2000 bits/second.”

Great. I seem to be able to use broadband, but currently I am running a 14Kb dial in modem.

I need to neglect information. I have to reduce the input.

Fish have a great mechanism for this, it’s called “front priority“:

“If the fish act upon any piece of information that hits their body the movement of the school gets slow and slight chaotic. By focusing mainly on the fish in front of them, you get this tightly packed movement. The fish seem to swim upstream the information flow.”

If we ignore pieces of information we are better off than having all the information? Can this be true?

Apparently so.

In his book “Blink” Malcolm Gladwell popularized the term “thin-slicing“:

“… our ability to gauge what is really important from a very narrow period of experience. In other words, spontaneous decisions are often as good as—or even better than—carefully planned and considered ones.”

This “thin slice of reality” is a pattern of all things happening in your surroundings. You take the slice and compare it with patterns stored in your mind. When you find a matching pattern, you have made up your mind about a particular situation. This is an unconscious process.

These patterns are dynamic systems in action, a human system seen over a time period. Patterns are trends over time and involve dependencies with other systems.

To spot such trends in projects we use metrics as indicators. If I have the right metrics I can ignore everything around me and focus just on the dashboard.

Can this be true?

We use metrics as indicators, but we need to visualize the data in such a way that trends and dependencies get visible.

The Gantt chart is a bad example. A very bad example.

Tufte presents a design for a Project Management interface that addresses some of the problems with rendering large Gantt Charts. He advocates splitting the chart into two views. At the top of the chart, you see the project timeline laid out in phases, with the current phase denoted with a unique color. On the bottom half of the chart, the local view basically zooms in on the current phase to display more detail.

I am still tired.

But it seems the best thing is to focus on a few things, reduce the input. It will increase my performance. But only if the input is presented in a proper way, in a way that visualizes trends and dependencies.

Can this really be true?

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. - Filtering Information: Why You Cannot See Everything is a post from: Project Shrink.

Six weeks ago I released the first draft of my ebook “Project Shrink: Linear Edition“. The reason for publishing unfinished work is to get early feedback. I am very happy to receive a lot of usable comments that will improve the material in the next releases.

Hal Macomber of Reforming Project Management made me aware that releasing the ebook in this fashion makes it an unbook. From now, it will be called my unbook. Sounds way cooler.

What Is The Main Theme?

The number one question I get about the, uhm, unbook is: “what is your main theme?” Just yelling “Projects are about humans!” is not going to cut it.

Recently, one reader (thanks Amos!) pressed some more on this topic.

Alright, alright, I’ll have a go at it!

Partial Information, Partial Influence, Partial Capability

Think about a Project Manager as a person in a huge network of interacting people. The PM can interact only with a few of them (his team, the stakeholders). The stakeholders interact also with others. People the PM knows, but more likely with people invisible to the Project Manager.

The Project Manager is running his project by interacting with his team and stakeholders, but the actual behavior of the project organization is determined by the sum of all interactions, including from the part of the network invisible to the PM.

Because of the size of the network, because of limited visibility on the network, because of the complexity of the network, the PM is getting partial information, always.

For the same reasons the PM has only partial influence. He cannot interact with “everyone”. He has no “power” over everyone.

If the information is the input and the influence is the output of a PM, his mind can be regarded as the transformation process. Because the amount of knowledge a brain can hold is limited, the PM is using partial capability.

How does a Project Manager run a successful project when he has partial information, partial influence and partial capability?

This is why I am focused on Project Management in a global, mobile, virtual and multi-cultural world. This is the context in which the image I just painted comes to life, is more visible.

Does This Make Sense To You?

I would love to get your feedback on this picture!

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. - The Partial Project Manager is a post from: Project Shrink.

by Ali Anani and Bas de Baar

In Fish And OODA Loops we introduced fish schooling as an important part of the Fish Pond Metaphor. Schooling mimics human tendency to organize and view our selves in groups of people. This leaves the question of how individual fish operate within a school resulting in one organic adaptive entity? Our preliminary answer is the topic of this posting.

Photography by Mr. Bologna

When fish pack together in a school their movements are tightly coordinated without one central fish giving orders. The school can make very sharp turns adapting to any threat in the environment. Speed is of essence. Be slow and you are dead. The fish on the outside of the school sense the threats. If enough outside fish make a certain turn the rest follows automatically.

Tightly packed bundles of protruding hairs, called a neuromasts, encased in a jelly-like sheath, are scattered around the head and body. Most are concentrated in two canals along the sides of the fish called lateral lines, which run from the head to the base of the tail. With the slightest change in pressure, the tiny hairs bend. The fish senses the movement of the objects around it, and quickly responds. (source)

The faster information is transferred through the whole school, the better its adaption. However, this is not the entire story. If the fish act upon any piece of information that hits their body the movement of the school gets slow and slight chaotic. By focusing mainly on the fish in front of them, you get this tightly packed movement. The fish seem to swim upstream the information flow.

As a result, the macroscopic behaviour of a school, such as its steering behaviour, is closely related to the transmission of information within the school … In particular, a sharp turn due to the synchronized movements of a majority of individuals in the school is related to the tendency of an individual to receive information about its neighbours mainly in front of it. This kind of synchronized movement is easily observed in natural fish schools such as sardines or herring. Their synchronous behaviour sometimes gives the illusion of a single large organism, which is said to be a defence strategy against attack from predators … Individuals in natural fish schools tend to follow the motion of their front neighbours, a tendency called front-priority … This front-priority tendency means that individuals in natural fish schools tend to receive information from their front neighbours. (source)

Instead of looking at information as some kind of package that is lying around somewhere, we have to view information as a stream.

We have to view information as a flow rather than as a thing. Online learning is a flow. Its like electricity or water. Its there, its available and it flows. Its not stuff you collect. I don’t see myself sitting in my home collecting jars of water. I use the water as it comes. If you think the internet as an environment that is moving and shaping all around you, then you will have a better attitude to be able to handle the flood of information that is coming at you (source)

The constant flow of information is dripping and feeding the OODA loop. If not enough information is flowing in, the image of the environment is incomplete. If too much information is entering the loop one drowns in an overload of information. And finally, the quality of the flow is important to our adaption skills. Poor or false information can be even more destructive than no data at all.

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. - Swimming Upstream The Information Flow is a post from: Project Shrink.