Welcome to the OPM podcasts OPM is the chartered body for the
project profession. My name is Emma divita and I'm
the editor of project apm's quarterly journal and your host
in the hot seat. Today, with me, is Eddie I bring
visiting professor at the school of growth Innovation and
Entrepreneurship at Henley business school, esteemed
columnist for apm's project journal and a p.m. honorary
fellow. He's also learning director at
the virtual business school Pentacle, a Ted speaker and
co-founder of cube. He's author of project
management. Bible all change the project
leaders secret handbook, a new edition of which is out this
year, Eddie calls himself a sense maker, and a Daft world.
So who better to give us their thoughts on the most important
Trends in project management for 2023 and what you should be
doing about them. So Eddie I'm hello, I'm
delighted to have you here. Hello, I'm delighted to be here
fantastic. I think it'd be useful for
listeners. The free picks up maybe three
Trends across the board that project managers should be
thinking about. Three Trends.
A, how about if we start with people?
Because that's probably closest to everyone.
Who's listening, almost everybody has found that their
world. The world around them has, got
more complex more difficult to recognize in terms of what's
going on. The pace has gone up their
ability to understand what the future will look like.
As got a little bit more unclear.
And for many of us, the connections we make to our
friends, our family, the rest of the organization.
In fact, our country He's has changed and I think most people
have recognized a little bit of that.
And so that's the background context.
The way I've described in the past when I'm trying to do a
shorthand, is I always talk about, you know, the pace of
change having a race against the pace of learning.
And when the pace of learning is winning, then you're in an
environment where you can understand what's going on.
You can see what's coming next because you can learn faster
world's changing. But when the pace of change
starts to win, then we move into what I call the new world, which
is Together different and in Project terms, I use that to
describe how projects are gone from being very clear and
obvious and I always describe his paint-by-numbers follow a
system to the challenge of projects being around.
Not knowing what you're going to do or not, knowing how you're
going to do it or not doing anything at all.
But everything must be done yesterday.
So people living in that world have both a logical pressure of
trying to get stuff done. But they had this enormous
emotional thing, hanging over them and post covid.
Everything seems Is this sped up even further.
So what's going on? So so all sorts of things.
The first is projects will speed up because one change leads to
another, that's the first law of change, adding change to change
creates chaos as law. So, if you do those two things
that you understand that, even when you try and slow down
projects, it gets more complex, but what do you seen from that
is people are therefore looking more for The Human Side of
project you would have noticed the trend Move from people,
talking about, I things like agility alone or delivery alone
or even benefits alone. Now, they talk about things
like, how do we make sure people can cope with the change?
So there's a lot of stuff around things like the Neuroscience of
projects, how people emotionally manage things through, you would
have spotted things like all this knee injury changing
injury. How do you survive the politics
and the change without getting caught up in it?
You'd have heard things around that.
You'd have noticed that. Especially because covid made
people move apart, and become dispersed.
And I'll come to this later. There is a challenge in terms of
trying to run a project team who aren't all sitting around the
same table. You can't actually get to where
you all, you can do is stare at their foreheads about once a day
via a teams and zoom. So so the human element is is
quite crucial and the leaders. Also, I think will find it more
difficult to get clarity from their stakeholders in terms of
either Our decisions because of the uncertainty or in terms of
performance. So, as a project leader project
manager also small lonely When it comes to the individual, what
could we be doing better? Or how do we better manage the
situation first thing is, you, you need to solve accept the
fact that you are in a world which isn't easy to predict in
detail, and if you accept that, then your life immediately gets
easier. I call it being lost in the fog
will come to this in a second, but the whole idea that you
won't always know what or how. So suddenly, the ability to
connect it, to learn to recognize patterns, becomes more
Important. So that's the first thing for
you to do that. You have to make space in your
mind because what happens is everyone's running around so
fast and we live on our devices and so we don't stop.
So we don't reflect. If you don't reflect you can't
learn if you don't reflect, you can't figure out patterns.
If you don't understand patterns, you don't know who to
connect to. So you have to make time to
reflect, absolutely crucial. That's number one, during your
reflection. Don't just look for today's
patterns, but recognize that as Human being the something which
is built into the back of your neck as software, which makes it
hard for you to deal with complex on certain changes.
It's basically you have this software in that part of your
brain, which checks to make sure everything is exactly the same
as it was before and this is exactly the same, it says,
relax, Is every every the same relaxed then it notices,
something has changed and that software has the job to go.
Oh my goodness. Something has changed close to
us. It could be anything, it could
be your role, your team, where it doesn't matter what the
changes, or even a loud noise, it goes.
Oh my goodness. I'm a human being.
I'm now under threat. So it quickly does three things.
First, most important thing is, it's, which is your logic off.
And the reason for it switching, your log Georgia, golf is
because it is trying to get you to react instinctively.
It then fills you, full of lots of emotion, usually, fear to get
you. Into the moment so you can't see
the future and your brain is Switched Off and then it fills
you full of adrenaline which is great if you were going to run
away from something but since the whole world 24/7 seems to be
chaotic, the adrenaline doesn't actually help you because
there's nowhere to run to all the big challenges you read
about in the news are huge. They look existential and they
make an actor at the make you figure.
You personally can do nothing. So you have this background
flee, free-floating anxiety. When you talk about reflection
is that something that you should be doing every day?
Is it something you can build into so it becomes a habit.
Do you do every day? Like it.
So particular time of day when you stop and think, yes, yes.
What you need to do is build it into your diary.
So there's one rule, which is plan tomorrow to today.
So so you plan the next day the day before because once the day
starts it just takes you over, okay?
And in the day you plant for tomorrow, you hide in there,
what I call holes which are meeting He's with yourself
lasting usually at least 15 minutes and if you can get a
couple of those or four or five of those into the day, then
you're in a good place, you plan a meeting yourself to a meeting
and you set it with yourself as when nobody can steal your
space. So how does reflection work?
Reflection works on you thinking back on the experiences, what
you plan to do, what worked, what didn't work, okay, and any
big surprises you've had. So if you know my stuff, you'll
know that there's a people engagement tool called Action
Replay. We'll help you think about what
you're going to do. But what you do is to looking
for those things, which you plan to do, which work didn't work.
And any big surprises which is another tool of mine called Land
by sharing. So I can have a look at that on
the internet and from there you then go.
Well I plan to do this, it didn't work.
What do I do? I do it differently how am I
going to do it? Apply didn't plan to this.
It worked anyway oh my goodness, how do I do more?
So you're using that to try and get some sort of control over
what you're doing, capture it, write it down and you're looking
for patterns. Why is it every time I've had
Stakeholders. They don't do this.
How come people are doing? Because once you see the
patterns, you don't have to chase after the events.
So that's the people side. I'm going to do the other half
of the people side, which is the stakeholder part.
Yeah, teams and stakeholders, almost everything you do start
from their point of view, not yours.
Because it is not from your point of view that all you will
do is trigger their crocodile brains and they will pretend
they're responding to you, but they're acting emotionally.
And then you have the sentence, you keep saying over Again is
why didn't they do? I ask them to do and it's cause
they didn't hear you because he frightens W surprise, that was
something like that. So stop where they are start
with what they're trying to do. So have you got any other tips
around handling a team stakeholders for 2023.
And so the stakeholder bid, the you can do what I'm suggesting
which is engage with them. Humility.
But some people are really struggling.
So sometimes you just have to slip through the gaps I call it
invisible lead. Leadership.
So you have to find ways of avoiding the politics and the
fear and the hassle but getting things done.
I remember ages ago, one of my early projects.
I when I was young project manager shell, I figured out
there was a particularly Troublesome senior person and
every time I did anything good and people ask me how it had
gone. I'd attribute My Success to that
person and that made it very difficult for him to be
obnoxious about my project because it was a whole I know we
hear you've been Helping Eddie. I mean, he probably can't pass
that made a sarcastic remark but I said, oh, your line was really
gave me some input. So this a line that we hate me
lady happy, helping anyone that projects going really well.
So so that's invisible leadership.
It's Nicole an injury these days.
But basically, what you're doing is you're trying to get through
things and not let people get in your way but you're not doing it
in a nasty way you're doing it by helping them by connecting.
But basically painting Teflon all over yourself so you can get
through all that. Complexity and challenge without
without getting stuck in it, okay?
At the second Trend you talked about was that kind of project
challenge. So I guess you mean greater
complexity what's going on in that area right now?
Yeah, so so, so we've got better project management we've got
better. All the all the decades I've
worked in project management, we've got better and better and
better at managing projects at the same time.
The success rates haven't Gone up that dramatically.
I'm not tells you that over that period of time.
Something is changing well, first of all, we started getting
much better at things like stakeholders and planning and we
went realized that we were not everything with into a Gantt
chart and we understood benefits.
So we've learned all these things.
I'm the whole professionalisation of project
management has been learning how to run projects, but every time
we did it, we then take on more complex projects or once we see
it will speed, or we'd work on them in different countries or
We work across cultures so that we had Indians trying to deal
with swedes, and with completely different cultural backgrounds,
or we make people separate, or would use technology where you
couldn't see the progress of the project, because the program
would say it's all going. Well, only a few bugs and you
couldn't test and so on and so forth.
Then we went into cultural projects and and the rest goes
on. So we made what we tackles more
complex And it has got more complex.
It's the people you're going to be dealing with a probably not
in the same place at the moment. Many organizations are
experimenting with building diverse workforces, which sounds
like a great idea until you put it into practice and then you
discover that that brings its own set of headaches because if
everyone is very similar, very little effort, has to go into
letting making them communicate or even a line in their
thoughts. But if everyone's diverse, you
have to put tremendous effort in to make them communicate.
You got put tremendous effort in to make sure their egos.
Don't get rubbed up the wrong way, because they misunderstood
each other. You go, but huge amount of
effort into making sure they are lying, and they've understood
each other and especially the language of the different.
The people are different. Their values are different.
Some of them were really care about the project, others won't.
So, so we've added that into the mix and it's not trivial at the
same time, we decided we were going to adopt after covid
Technologies, which promote primarily make us stressed.
I'll explain why so sheep. And goats have the eyes on the
side, why? So they can see behind them.
Why? Because they get eaten by other
animals. Their prey animals, human
beings, wolves Lions cats. They arise in front.
Why? Because they eat other animals.
Okay? So what we've done is we've
given ourselves this Age where normally you don't look a
Predators because it's scary. And if you look at Predators, as
you just look at one, if you have 20 Predators, you know,
you're going to get eaten because and you look from one to
the other. But we've actually designed the
software where you have a grid of 20 or 12 Predators staring at
you for an hour at a time. And so everybody is crocodile
brain, the old amygdalas firing all the time.
Your emotions are all over the place full of adrenaline.
And then the other headache, of course is, but half of us are
introverts. So we think in our heads and we
don't really necessarily want to see an image of ourselves on the
screen. So the mechanisms were using,
for all the introverts out there.
My heart goes out to you because you end up staying at yourself
and it's horrible. So we're trying to manage all
these people in complex projects where we're not able to engage
with them because of the technology we work in bigger
groups. So it's harder sometimes to get
to the truth because when you have multiple people Times, they
don't want to confess to everything, and that's, that's
the environment. And then we've got bigger more
complex projects, and many organizations, have less money
to spend because of all the lock down costs and so on.
So they don't want to get things wrong.
So there's more pressure on the project to deliver and at the
same time we may have moved to more agile ways of working.
So we have to have more communication in through these
media, which may not be getting us the information which we
want. I hope I painted the picture and
people would recognize. So what do we do about that?
If I Go in like three different directions that will probably be
useful. So the first one I'll link to
what I said about foggy projects.
So when you are running a project which is full of
uncertainty, I call it being lost in the fog.
Things to remember, would you ever follow anyone through the
fog? You didn't trust now.
Yeah, so so when you're on that level of complexity job, number
one for the project. Leader is to get people to trust
them especially in senior stakeholders, if they don't
trust you, what happens, they keep asking for updates or
clarification, they also updates.
Then instead of you doing your job, you're busy writing
updates. So it burns much more of your
time, put you under more stress for the senior people, the other
way thing you need to do to get them to trust.
You is to get them to realize that just because you haven't
reported anything, doesn't mean nothing is happening.
So, the difference in what you're expecting, what's
happening is called the anxiety Gap.
So when Cena people suffer from an anxiety Gap, they asked for
reports. So part of what you have to do
is to try to make sure that they never suffer from an anxiety
Gap. Even in a complex for key
project because otherwise it makes life more difficult for
you and you go slower. Let's talk about technology.
So technology. Temptation technology, it has
always been an illusion and it continues to be illusion.
I'm lucky because I'm old. So that means I have this thing
called perspective so I can remember all the way.
Back to when they told us things like no one work in the future,
will only have work one day a week and we'll have paperless
office is and all these new things called computers.
They're going to save us time and you won't have to look at
them for more than about five minutes a day.
So I can remember all the promises and I can tell you
consistently that software is software solved.
Real life problems, permanently, we would have no problems in our
lives because there's so much software out there.
So now park the software. The problem is primarily around.
Humans and living beings. That's where our challenge is
all come from. And as a general rule, Because
people don't do that future Dreaming or what I call Future
mapping. I'm going to put it out there
and get killed but I would say a good 75 percent of all the
problems. People talk about today problems
are actually the result of yesterday's Solutions.
So almost all of today's problems come from yesterday's
Solutions, because when the solution goes in, nobody bothers
to see what happens next. But the technology these days,
especially, because of the digital Revolution, it tempts Us
in different ways. So many of you people listening
might have played with AI with ideally chat, GPT and having fun
with that. So, so we know, we know these
Technologies are here and we've watched machine learning
Automation and we know I wrote an article a while ago about
what would happen if you had. A project leader, less project,
like a driverless car or Co less organization and it was a joke.
But I was, I was making the point.
That make a driverless car work. You only need six systems, you
know, lidar radar. Bob, they do different things.
Some that look wise on the close by, and some of my guide, the
wheels and so on, and as an analogy, if you take those six
systems and what they do, you can apply to a lot of what
leaders and CEOs do would we want to replace them know
because the emotional and human and empathy and the passion on
The energy and that, how do you deal with new surprises?
He's not built into that particular approach, but the
technology is very tempting and we really are afraid that AI is
going to fix everything for us. But I think, I think it's a,
from my point of view, the way I would approach using technology
is I have a slogan. My slogan is empowering and
Hounds people don't enslave and embrace them, like a python.
So, what you mean by that, what I mean by that is, Your project
leader. Okay, what do you want the
technology to do? Is to let you be in Australia
and America on the same day and power you to do that.
You want the technology the AI to trawl all your project plans
and tell you which people you need to have meetings with.
You don't want the AI to send out a letter on email to those
people to see whether up to the technology should Empower you
making super and should enhance your.
Our ability to be a human being. But the fashion is the exact
opposite, which is the technology is something you have
to type your data D2 data into. So basically, you are enslaved
to it. You have to keep putting
information into your Clarity, whatever it is or the AI is kept
busy. Busy trying to use up all the
big data, so you can see where the big trends are whatever it
is, but you become enslaved to feeding the machine and it
completely Embraces. You like a python, it squeezes
you. So for me, if I don't you ask
me. How to deal with the Temptation
Of Technology, you have to realize that the trick is figure
out what you have as your vision which is going to empower you
your team, your stakeholders, your organization or enhance how
people work, so that they have better, Human Relationships,
outcomes faster. And so on, when you figured that
out, then look at the Technologies available, don't do
the other way around. Don't just accept, all
Corporation believes that everybody should use blue.
Ah technology. No, no, no.
Be awkward say well okay great. But the technology is not the
solution. The reason we're doing this is
so we can work as a team and because 25 different countries.
So what do we need? We need to be able to see things
because we don't all speak the same first language.
So if we draw together, it's much more useful and so on so
forth. So again, if you think about the
technology started from what you need, not from, not from what
you're being offered. Eddie, you've left me inspired
invigorated. I'm ready to go.
Now, I think you've packed in so many practical tips for also
areas to really think about. So I just want to say thank you
so much for your time. And for your wisdom, what did
whether wisdom? But, thank you very much.
Thanks again to ready for joining us, and to you for
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