It's dangerous to be a binary speaker

Clinging to what you know may mean sacrificing the best solution, says Mike Clayton

Life would be simple but dull in a world without choice. Chaining yourself to the same solution for every new challenge may give you a reassuring sense of certainty and confidence, but it sacrifices the flexibility necessary to deal successfully with a different set of circumstances. What worked in the past won’t necessarily work in the future.

We tend to cling to what we know. When faced with a fresh problem, we prefer to stick to a familiar approach, or make minimal changes, hoping that the amplifier effect will take care of the big changes we need in the outcome (curiously, this does sometimes work).

A riskier approach is to make some big changes in the desperate hope that these will save the underlying model, but sometimes this won’t be enough, because the underlying model does not fit the new context.

This is where we need a wholly new solution, and when someone finds it we get the seed of a revolution. When others adopt the new idea, we are led towards a paradigm shift. There are now two ways of looking at the world.

The problem with the messy complexity of reality is that things rarely divide neatly into clear and different situations. We are simple souls at heart and like simple answers. Should we choose solution A or solution B? Some of us are so attracted to that simplicity that we will barely allow for the existence of alternative approaches.

This is the origin of didacticism and ultimately fanaticism. Binary choices foster dangerously simplistic thinking. I’ll avoid any of the obvious examples, but the worlds of politics and religion are awash with them.

Binary thinkers are a danger to us all. Offering people a binary choice, or even suggesting that this is all there is, creates tragedies.

In project management, we have our own binary choice to avoid. Predictive project methodologies are as old as the hills. But with IT development came the need for a new way of thinking, and so we have seen the emergence of adaptive methodologies, many of which predate The Agile Manifesto.

Predictive methods have always had their own elements of iteration and incrementalism, and it’s nonsense to say that these were invented by agilists. It’s an even bigger nonsense to ever get yourself entangled in a debate about whether waterfall or agile is best. Both have much merit, but few situations are well suited to a purist approach.

A binary choice is no choice at all: it’s a dilemma. Worse still, binary choices force us to reject one option and throw away everything it has to offer. No sane project manager would create a business case with fewer than three options. And so it must be when you are considering which approach to take on your next project.

We now have an embarrassment of riches, with many different methods, processes and tools in our predictive project management arsenal, as well as a wealth of tools and methodologies under the various guises of lean, agile and adaptive. Your task is to understand the context of your project, where it sits and its intimate nature. Then select a hybrid approach that draws together and integrates the very best tools, systems and ideas that you can find to serve your project and stakeholders. There have never been more choices for crafting your project. We are continuously learning from these and developing new ones. I am therefore optimistic for the future of project management.

Now, onto a more taxing question. Projects would be simple if it weren’t for people, and people don’t change. Where are the new approaches to solving the social, political and cultural problems we face in this messy and complex world?

Dr Mike Clayton is a speaker and trainer, the author of several project management books and founder of OnlinePMCourses. Connect at linkedin.com/in/mikeclayton