This article takes a brief look at each of the disciplines espoused by Senge, which, according to him, are the hallmarks of a “learning” organization:

• Personal Mastery
• Mental Models
• Systems Thinking
• Shared vision, and
• Team learning.

In the backdrop of software projects, systems thinking, personal mastery and mental models work on the level of the individual, while the concept of shared vision and team learning have more to do with team dynamics. This is applicable for the project manager / leader as well as the team member. Every discipline will have relevant links to articles on Project Shrink, so you can plan ideas for improvement.

Personal Mastery

Photography by Mind meal.

“Personal Mastery” is another name given to the state of Self-Knowledge. Project Managers should have a great sense of why they are doing what they are doing. Are you performing a technique because you are supposed to do as a professional, or because you really think personally that the technique will be beneficial to the project? Another part of Personal Mastery can be found in clearly knowing your own desires and goals, your strengths and limitations.

Mental Models

Photography by Tom@HK.

“Turning the mirror inwards” is how Peter Senge describes mental models. He has taken as basis for his postulates, the research work done by Dr. Chris Argyris in the field of mental modeling. Dr Argyris, in his path breaking studies, made the contention that people who manage projects swing between two mental models – one that they adopt as their favorite, and the other that they eventually slip into, in actual practice.

Traditionally favorite mental models bestride extremes of the spectrum – with a plan-and-plan-to-minutest-detail project management approach balancing a plan-minimally-and-manage-as-you-go approach. Senge’s mental model recognizes the “inherent” chaos in managing software projects upfront. Though the initial set of conditions that a project takes off from may be as orderly as possible, Senge suggests that we

• Understand and value “leaps of abstractions” – that is, the tendency to generalize specific issues;
• Recognize the subtext beneath our words that go into the project plan – that is, understand and appreciate that your perception of the other party is saying may be different from what actually got said;
• Strive to achieve a deft balance between the skill of inquiry and advocacy – this is done through actively listening to the other party, and, at the same time, articulating one’s own thought processes and encouraging others to fill in any gaps that they see
  in them;
• Keep in focus the ambivalence in our own favorite theories and the ones that we actually end up practicing.

Mental models provide us with lenses to view the world. If we look through a depressing lens, we see depressing things and behave accordingly. By using different mental models, or mindsets, we can understand other people better, by adopting assumptions of the other person.

Systems Thinking

Photography by Eirikref.

Systems thinking, as a discipline, requires a shift of mind:

• From focusing on cause-effect chains, to focusing on interrelationships between the components; and
• From looking at snapshots and arriving at conclusions, to looking at processes of change, and then form conclusions.

The key factor that matters in Systems Thinking, is that not only is the whole greater than the sum of its parts, but also it is different from the parts themselves. Systems thinking helps us with making sense of the complexity around us. To find some answers in search for causes of project problems. You need some clues to introduce the proper intervention.

Shared Vision

Photography by Lovelypetal.

Shared Vision is a group effort, as opposed to the earlier three disciplines that we have discussed so far. This discipline requires the project team to ask the Five Whys
about the project in order to be clear about the underlying tenets of the work in hand. This also helps in establishing the boundaries of the project and to articulate metrics against which success of the project shall be measured. The end result of this exercise shall be an “Initial Vision” state that the team shall have reached.

This vision is then “sold” to all the stakeholders, through status meetings, emails, etc. Perhaps an exclusive Web site that details the project in full, and is packed with all the relevant information – which all the stakeholders have access to – would help too. The idea here is to transform the “initial” vision to a “shared” vision, where everybody is aware of how the project has to perform and go.

Team Learning

Photography by Veni Markovski.

Like the Shared Vision, Team Learning is a group-centric discipline in Senge’s scheme of things. Team Learning has its roots in fostering creativity amongst the team members through three dimensions:

• Thinking insightful on issues that are inherently complex;
• Taking innovative and coordinated action on specific tasks; and
• Creating a network that encourages other teams to participate and take action as well.

By picking members for a software project that have the right mix of skills and mindset – whose Personal Mastery is such that there is no possibility of working at cross-purposes – and putting them through the process of Systems Thinking and Mental Modeling, one gets to the stage where a cohesive team has been built. A Shared Vision follows. When all the team members are on the same wavelength so far as the software project goes, contributing their ideas on a particular problem in a group becomes easy. Ideas start building seamlessly upon one another, and the entire team learns through this process.

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. - Fifth Discipline: What To Do When All Your Projects Are Failing is a post from: Project Shrink.

I must admit, that the first time a played The SIMS I immediately try to get them to kill of love each other. I mean: “Looking for a job” Yeah, yeah. “Hitting the next door neighbor” Cool! Assuming that I am not the only weirdo here, and to make stuff entertaining, lets go to our example.

Consider the actor Tiffany in a game. She might have the following properties:

• Gender (M/F) := F
• Age (number) := 30
• Lust (number) := 50
• Anger (number) := 40

We have a 30 year old female that is rather neutral on her emotions lust and anger. Tiffany might be doing something. Actually, every actor is always “doing” something at a given moment. E.g. sleeping, drinking, having a shower or playing chess. This is called the “state” of the actor. Although in reality what people are doing can be limitless; a state can only be a value from a limited list. Of course, this might be a long list. Lets say Tiffany is currently “drinking”. At this moment we have a 30 year old woman having a drink and feeling normal. This game doesnt sound like a lot of fun, does it? So, lets give it some action.

Tiffany is one outgoing person, to put it like that; when her lust-level is 50 or above, she needs to satisfy her lust, this will become her “goal”. If you are fond of some abstract syntax you like the following notation about Tiffany:

• Goal::Satisfy lust
• State:=all
• Threshold:=lust=>50

So, it doesnt mind what she is doing, when the lust peaks, so does she. One of the strategies she has up her sleeve to fulfil this goal is to just kiss someone. But how to select a suited partner? Or a willing victim if you want. The game will have some rules to determine the target, the actor with whom to interact with.

• Target: gender=M; lust>90.

All males with a lust above then 90 can be a target. The computer will run through the list of actors in the game to search for candidate that fits the rule. If it has found one, we get to the part where you can see something happening in the game. If it has selected a strategy (kiss someone), found a suited target, it will run some predefined activities associated with this strategy: walk towards the target, say hi, do some chitchat, etc. This is all finally visible on your screen. And finally when the goal is satisfied, when Tiffany finally has her long desired kiss, this will influence her properties; perhaps in this case her lust-level will finally drop by ten points.

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. - Sims Project Model: Tiffany’s Lust is a post from: Project Shrink.

To be able to discuss how people operate within a project, it is important to have some kind of idea in our head about people, their behavior and how they interact. Some kind of model. Of course a model is a simplification of reality; we leave things out, we make stuff easier, just to be able to understand it all. This might be a small problem, but we have no choice. Without ignoring aspects and making a few assumptions there is no way on earth our brain will get it. Sorry to bring this to you: but our mind is too small for reality.

When looking for a way to describe how people operate, you just have to be totally amazed by the popular computer game The SIMS. In this game you simulate a group of people that live together. They go to work, they sleep, they have coffee with the neighbours, and they have sex and raise their children. The simulation runs in principle by itself, but the fun is that you can interfere in their situation; can withhold them from food, provide them a lot of money, make them hate or love each other. You just sway your magic wand, kick back and see how your actors in the game react. And what staggers me the most, and why I bring up this subject in the first place, is the level of detail, and live like feel of the simulation. They really nailed it down, simulating ordinary people on their own and in a group.

Just from the looks of it, it seems worth to look a little closer to the underlying behavioral game engine (the part of the game which emulates individuals behave depending on interactions with other actors in the system) to help us crack the code for a proper model. Of course this will be a simplification of the real deal.

Every individual in the game is called an ‘actor’. Every actor has some properties that describe it. Of course you have a name so you know who is who, but you also consider aspects that are a given like age and gender. Next to these kind of ‘given’ properties you have items that describe the state of mind the actor has at any given moment, and yes, they will change. Think about emotions like lust and anger, or physical conditions like hunger and general health.

To be able to do something useful with these properties, they can have values. Of course, gender can be Male or Female, but for things like Anger you can use numbers: 0 can mean completely without anger, and with a value of 100 the steam is getting out of an individuals ears.

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. - How To Learn Project Management By Playing The Sims is a post from: Project Shrink.

For the context of projects I will focus on a special type of systems: Complex Adaptive Systems, or CAS for short. I will first throw you off guard with a formal definition, after which I will explain a little more. The following definition is from John H. Holland:

Photography by Phauly.

“A Complex Adaptive System (CAS) is a dynamic network of many agents (which may represent cells, species, individuals, firms, nations) acting in parallel, constantly acting and reacting to what the other agents are doing. The control of a CAS tends to be highly dispersed and decentralized. If there is to be any coherent behavior in the system, it has to arise from competition and cooperation among the agents themselves. The overall behavior of the system is the result of a huge number of decisions made every moment by many individual agents.” (source: Waldrop, 1992)

Before you go all bouncy, let me tell you a story about the Game of Life. In 1990, while at university, a popular programming exercises was to create a small program based upon John Conways (a mathematician from the 60s) computer simulation “Life”. The idea is that you have a 2-dimensional grid with cells. These cells can be alive or dead (on or off, colored or blank). When the simulation is running the state of a cell is determined by three simple rules:

• If the cell has no living neighbors or just one, it will be dead (caused by loneliness);
• If four or more of the cells next to it are alive, it will be dead (overcrowding);
• If a dead cell has exactly three living neighbors it will come alive (Bitstorm).

The effect of these simple rules can be quite surprising. The starting grid can be very chaotic, but after a while you can see patterns emerge, and even stable situations can be reached where nothing will change any more, or the same patterns are just repeated over and over.





This simple program shows how from a simple set of rules that only take into account the cell itself and its direct neighbors can create some complex patterns in an entire system (the grid as a whole).

And this is exactly what is known as complex adaptive systems (CAS). Systems like this are the economy, the weather and human interaction, and the game of Life is a very simple one. In a CAS a very large group of small components or agents are interacting with each other. These local interactions are following some general rules. The collective of all these interactions, the sum if you want, determines the behavior of the whole system.

After previous postings on this blog (and wait until you reach my next posts about about The SIMS) you don’t have to wonder what this all has to do with project management. The people involved in the project and its surroundings are considered the “agents”. It is the human interaction between all those stakeholders that determines the overall behavior of the project. Nothing new here. But, applying CAS literally means that rules aren’t applied to the project as a whole, but the focus should be the individual interactions between people. That is way this entire exercises is so important.

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. - What Are Complex Adaptive Systems? is a post from: Project Shrink.

]]> http://www.projectshrink.com/complex-adaptive-systems-82.html/feed 2 http://www.projectshrink.com/projects-as-social-interactions-81.html http://www.projectshrink.com/projects-as-social-interactions-81.html#comments Mon, 24 Sep 2007 09:05:49 +0000 Bas http://blog.softwareprojects.org/projects-as-social-interactions-81.html 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. - Why Projects Are Nothing More Than Social Interactions is a post from: Project Shrink.
]]> Whatever your take is on projects, at the end of the day it is just a bunch of people working together to achieve a certain goal. During this endeavor to laugh, cry, pull pranks, play dirty tricks and have all other kind of behavior towards each other. If you are lucky they even work to reach the final goal. If you take everything away, and put people in the center of what a “project” is, you will see a group of stakeholders interacting with each other, just like any other group of people would do.



Just to make things easier on our lives, we call the result of all this behavior “the project”. In this sense it is nothing more than an abstraction. If we say “the project is late”, this doesn’t mean that some creature or entity from outer space showed up later than expected; it is the result of the project people working together that wasn’t finished on the time we predicted.

In this sense the word “project” is the same as “economy”. If our economy is improving, there is not some kind of energy force that is doing better than before. The whole system of people working, people buying and people living that is better off in some way than in the past. We need this kind of abstraction, just to be able to cope with it; it is easier to talk about the economy than about 100 million individuals.

And the funny thing is that this abstraction influences the people that make up the underlying system; if the economy is doing better, people will spend more, if a project is late, people will work harder.




Figure: the interactions of stakeholders “make” the project. The properties given to the abstraction “project” influence the stakeholders.

If you try to define a project from this point of view, the best definition I know of comes from Doug De Carlo (2005) in Extreme Project Management:

“A project is a localized energy field comprising a set of thoughts, emotions, and interactions continually expressing themselves in physical form.”

In case you are wondering at this moment what the role of the Project Manager is in this context. He should steer the stakeholders in such a manner that the resulting behavior (the sum if you will) reaches the desired business goal. But that will be the main focus of the entire book, so relax, we will get into this later on in much detail. For now, just hold on to the thought that the stakeholders make up the elements of the project as a system. They are independent from each other, but their social interactions affect each other.

The following postings provide additional information about viewing a project as the result of interactions:

My Current Model For PM
Complex Adaptive Systems
Projects As A Complex Adaptive System: Why Bother?
The Sims As A Project Model
Sims Project Model: Tiffanys Lust
Sims Project Model: Berts Lack Of Recognition
Reality Refuses To Follow Your Plan
Explaining PM Approaches
Four Mechanisms In PM Methods
Why Societies And Projects Fail Or Succeed
Project Profiling With Systems Thinking

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. - Why Projects Are Nothing More Than Social Interactions is a post from: Project Shrink.

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