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Leading complex projects: Learning through Action Research
Summer 2013
Leading complex projects: Learning through Action Research Despite significant investment in project management, many high-profile projects still fail to deliver what is expected. Sue Pritchard and Danny Chesterman describe how an Action Research Consortium was set up to address this challenge, and propose that there is a need to build and maintain bridges between the hitherto separate fields of project management, leadership development and organisational learning.
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Leading complex projects: Learning through Action Research
Summer 2013
Sue Pritchard is a Research Fellow in the Ashridge Centre for Action Research, a Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Leeds Engineering Projects Academy, and an Associate Partner with the International Centre for Complex Project Management. Sue is researcher, writer and consultant, interested in how to improve leadership and delivery in complex projects. Sue and Danny led the action research consortium on which this article is based.
Danny Chesterman is a Business Director at Ashridge,
Email: sue@suleis.com
Email: danny.chesterman@ashridge.org.uk
specialising in leadership development and whole system change in complex organisations. He works with individuals, teams and organisations, especially in the public sector, to facilitate change. Danny and Sue led the action research consortium on which this article is based.
The starting point “In spite of all the investment made on project management, why do some of the most highly resourced, independently evaluated, national-critical and politically important projects still fail to deliver what’s expected of them?” Whilst there have been some notable recent successes – like the London Olympics – nonetheless this question still exercises government, business and academics, and affects major and complex projects in all sectors alike. Stories of large-scale ‘failure’ still hit the media, fuelled by reports from the Public Accounts Committee, which examines the expenditure allocated to major public projects: “...only one third of major projects deliver to time and budget….” From Public Accounts Committee review of Major Projects Authority 2012.
There has been no shortage of effort in attempting to tackle these issues; good work has been (and continues to be) done in a number of august institutions. For
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example, in 2011 the International Centre for Complex Project Management published their task force report Global Perspectives and the Strategic Agenda to 2025; in the same year, the Government launched a Major Projects Authority which has made “good progress in its first year” (PAC 20121); and the National Audit Office published its guidance on Initiating Successful Projects. Nonetheless, we noticed that there was still a significant gap. No other institution at that time was working with organisations AND their project leaders or Senior Responsible Officers (SROs), to integrate leading practice from (often disconnected) bodies of knowledge, to create practical tools and approaches to improve complex project implementation. More importantly no one appeared to be doing this in a way which really involved project managers and the leaders of organisations – and all of their messy, everyday reality – as co-researchers. Working with an emerging ‘complex projects’ community of practice, Sue Pritchard and Danny Chesterman proposed
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Mapping the landscape “Ninety percent of new Government policy is delivered through projects.” Amyas Morse, Comptroller General, NAO, speaking at the launch of ICCPM White Paper, 2011.
In the last 20 years or so, project managers have been engaged in increasingly complex projects. These complex projects have particular characteristics: they are politically sensitive – often crossing jurisdictions and cultures; have multiple stakeholder perspectives – not all aligned and often highly contested; are expensive – often in the £ billions; they are working with technologies that may be emerging or incomplete – or not even developed. Above all, they are characterised by a climate of uncertainty and inherent unpredictability. We noticed that, within the traditional project management (PM) paradigm, failure to deliver projects has most often been ascribed to failures of implementation – the assumption being that IF ONLY the PM process were properly applied then the failure wouldn’t have occurred. But when we talked with experienced leaders of these complex projects, they told us that the whole project management paradigm was no longer fit for purpose. Traditional project and programme management skills were necessary, sure enough, but they were not sufficient on their own to lead to successful outcomes. Rev Dr Michael Cavanagh describes this as the paradigm shift from 1st Order to 2nd Order Project Management2. We also noticed that this broad territory included many ways of looking at and understanding the notion of project management. Here, as in many areas of discourse on leadership, management and organisation, the same common words are used to describe often very different – and
sometimes contested – values, principles and practices. Our earlier work in leading whole systems indicated the benefits of ‘holding frameworks’: “...such frameworks focus on creating receptive conditions for change…” and allow “….leaders [to] contain people’s natural anxieties about the impact of change AND create the space for them to work on new ways to tackle previously intractable problems.” 3
A holding framework for leading complex projects We developed a model as a temporary holding framework for new conversations about leading complex projects. This model (Figure 1) identifies six common and familiar categories, or ways of talking
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about organisational activity, and creates a ‘temporary and provisional’ map to explore and discuss the issues and challenges. Our provisional framework links these headings by three connecting processes: • Engaging: people up, down, across and outside the system AND our whole selves: intellect, emotions, energy to act deliberately
• Enquiring:
seeking
other perspectives, being open to disconfirming data, curious about the impact you are having • Enabling: promoting action, innovation, experimentation; valuing small scale yields that over time lead to solutions.
Strategy
Learning
Governance
en
qu
g
lin
irin
b na
g
e Delivering complex programmes
Programme skills
engaging
hosting an Action Research Project, involving people with live real experience of leading complex projects and across a variety of organisations and sectors.
Leading complex projects: Learning through Action Research
Culture
Leadership
Figure 1. A ‘whole systems’ approach
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Leading complex projects: Learning through Action Research
We used this as an opening proposition and invitation to explore this common question, whilst also resisting the tendency to get attached to such models as if they are the definitive view of the world. But nonetheless, it seemed important, as action researchers, to do two things: 1. To put our own assumptions, beliefs and perspectives out on the table so that our call to collaborate attracted those with similar concerns 2. To provide a potential template for our work. The opening article which set out our stall, as it were, grew into a compendium of working papers, co-produced with colleagues in this growing community of practice.
What is Action Research and why did we choose it? Action research is a form of research carried out by people on their own work. It is rather different from other forms of academic research in that it is not trying to create objective findings which can be generalised, but rather it aims to be of use to practitioners by solving problems, answering questions, developing new practices and developing new understanding. It is grounded in the fundamental assumption that the best way to understand a situation is to participate in it. Action research uses repeated cycles of action and reflection, and draws on many ways of knowing – intellectual and theoretical, and also practical, experiential, tacit, emotional, expressive, and intuitive. For our starting point for the action research, therefore, we deliberately chose a perspective in which organisations and human systems are viewed as essentially social processes. We invited potential participants to bring in their lived experience of leading complex projects, encouraging diverse and unorthodox perspectives. We wanted to use these real, often still raw and unprocessed, experiences to reflect together on the realities of leading in conditions of intense pressure, contestation and uncertainty.
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The participants After a series of exploratory sessions which enabled people to decide whether or not they could commit to the shared intent, and also participate in some co-design, senior people from an interestingly diverse range of organisations formally joined the project: BAE Systems, Rolls Royce, Defence and Scientific Technical Laboratories, Halcrow, Parsons Brinckerhoff, Public Health Wales, NHS Institute of Innovation and Improvement, BP, DHL, Mt Allison University (Canada), National Audit Office, Europrop Intl, Crawley Borough Council, and ICCPM. Sue Pritchard and Danny Chesterman shared the facilitation.
What we did To mark the launch of the formal action research project, we started with a two-day event in June 2011, where we introduced the practice of action research, provided a draft structure to the inquiry, shaped our purposes together and got connected. A few weeks later we held a follow-up session to identify potential sites we would visit or the issues we would explore. In each case the requirement was for the site or issue to be something that really mattered to participants and was part of their current role in leading a complex project. The four visits/inquiries that emerged, all hosted by participants were: • A visit to the Portsmouth Naval Base, where BAE Systems work alongside Navy and Defence officials to build and support the UK’s defence fleet • An inquiry into how the Welsh Public Health Team was setting about the challenge of improving the life chances of the poorest children in Wales through a ‘project’ paradigm • A round-table discussion with the National Audit Office, who were engaged in exploring how they can support the development of better metrics for complex projects
• An inquiry into how to take knowledge management beyond mere repositories of knowledge and into an embedded learning culture in a very lean, global organisation like DHL. These were supplemented by three webinars offered and delivered by participants: • Tim Podesta from BP on the use of metrics to reveal the dimensions of complexity at project start-up • Helen Bevan from the Institute of Innovation and Improvement in Health on the way they are applying ideas from social movement theory to large scale change • Tim Banfield from the National Audit Office on what their research was revealing about effective ways of initiating new complex projects. At the end of the project we designed a process of paired reflections and, prompted by our work on ‘knowledge management’ for complex projects, a closing gathering where we explored how being part of this consortium had made an impact on participants’ projects – and, indeed, the ‘learning legacy’ we hope to pass on.
Insights and vignettes from the action research It’s hard to do justice to all the conversations and insights that occurred during the project. Each participant tells their own story about what was most important to them: for us, as the facilitators and charged with writing up the concluding stories, these statements convey a flavour, at least, of the conversations we most appreciated.
1. Leadership • Leading as sense making within the wider system, and using stories to mobilise contagious social movements • Transcending polarities, appreciating differences and being curious about perspectives other than your own
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• Developing leaders who are willing to dwell in uncertainty despite being expected to know the answers
Leading complex projects: Learning through Action Research
• Being prepared to talk about the loneliness of being ‘in command’ but not ‘in control’.
• From the visit to Portsmouth, the inspiring example of teaming beyond boundaries, how to create a bigger sense of ‘us’ (as well as noticing how easy it is to just create another ‘them’ and how to mitigate this)
2. Governance
• Creating the conditions in which people will ‘speak truth to power’4
• How internal barriers in many organisations (access to information, security, etc.) inhibit our ability to see system complexity, and the responsibility of leaders to address this
• Remembering that people connect with values when they feel heard and that paradoxically change happens usually when we feel fully accepted for how we are.
• The politics of failure, how system failures get buried to avoid loss of face and embarrassments; and the price that needs to be paid for success • How we manage anxiety and develop transparency and openness in exploring, disclosing and managing risk.
3. Strategy • Reframing strategy as a dynamic action, ‘strategising’ (and not a thing to be lovingly crafted by the top team and then left on the boardroom shelf) • The importance of mapping wholes as well as counting the parts • From the work in Wales in improving the life chances of the poorest under-5s, the need to understand the micro context, the family, the street, the locality • How to draw on the resources embedded in local histories to ground strategies for change • How hard it is to change behaviours even when we know what we are doing is not working!
4. Culture • Overcoming tribalism, becoming aware of how we are, perhaps, ‘hard wired’ to create an ‘us’ from our very early human development, belonging to groups for safety and identity. The shadow side of this is that we also create ‘them’ – the difference that contributes to the creation of ‘us’
5. Learning • The notion that learning takes place “between the noses” rather than just “between the ears” – carried in the interrelationships in a complex system not just privately within individuals • The vital importance of stepping back to make room for learning, change, insight, reflection, enabling knowledge flows • Aligning private with public narratives, what’s said and what’s unsaid. • The importance of questioning those whose evidence counts when judgements are made and accounts of what happened are assembled • How we need to value subjectivity as well as objectivity, intuitions as well as facts
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• Conversely, the absence of any vocabulary to talk about complexity in organisations and how this impacts on how we understand the relational aspects of such projects.
• Practical tools for leading change What energised this group, though, was the focus on the practical, on the lived experience of ‘real world’ leadership and delivery – what has been called the ‘knowing/doing’ gap. We became aware that, sometimes, the notion of using ‘tools’ can cause an abreaction, since they convey, metaphorically, images of the long-handled screwdrivers and big hammers most often used from a machine mindset. But tools are also eminently practical and helpful when using ecological and living systems metaphors: we especially liked evoking gardening and growing metaphors, which allowed us to explore the deeper patterns and rhythms of human experience6. As part of our joint inquiry, we explored ways of measuring the ‘felt’ sense of levels of complexity in terms of governance, strategy, and culture at the start-up phase of new complex projects. Opposite is an extract of one of those metrics:
• Seeding lots of small experiments for learning on the edge of our current experience and expertise and to enlarge possibilities for action • Recognising ‘inch-stones’ not ‘milestones5’ – to value small steps in complex change processes. In all of this we noted the importance, the fatefulness, of the language we use to approach the field: • Using ‘living systems’ and ‘ecological’ metaphors to reframe how we understand and navigate project environments, rather than the more usual machine-based or military ones
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Leading complex projects: Learning through Action Research
A metric for measuring cultural complexity at project start-up To tease out the scale of cultural complexity at project start up, metrics need to address both the outer and the inner challenges. Outer challenge: 1. What is the cultural composition of the project; i.e., how many different countries are involved? 2. What are the gender and generational dynamics? 3. What different professional cultures are involved? 4. What are the different institutional values and orientations? How would you rate the diversity and scale of difference for each of these four cultural dimensions? (Scale 1- 5) Inner challenge: 1. How anxious are you about the cultural challenges facing this project? (Scale 1- 5) 2. How effective, robust, open, challenging and enquiring do you believe current conversations to be? (Scale 1-5) 3. How confident are you that the required capabilities will be in place to navigate and leverage the potential of cultural diversity in this project? (Scale 1-5) Add up the seven scores. A score of 26-35 means a high challenge for governance, 16-25 is middle level, 1-15 is low.
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It’s essential, though, to use these tools in ‘facilitated inquiry’ mode, not as objective truths or mathematical exercises. The data generated stimulates fresh conversations between project participants to surface and explore their assumptions and theories of change. Participants reported that doing so could change the pattern of conversation, and therefore the thinking and possibilities for action, in a project or organisation.
Erik Johannesen, PMA, BAE Systems
This theme – shifting the patterns of conversation7 in organisation – permeated all our talk around the dimensions of our working framework; perhaps most critically it highlighted for us the importance of creating and sustaining crucibles for experimentation and learning.
Personal and organisational impacts Participants reported a number of ways in which the action research consortium experience had been powerful for them: It has been profound. Lifting me out of the narrow thinking around the NHS and current doom and gloom........I now think of embracing the whole system as a coalition in change. We can’t do it ourselves. Bob Hudson, Chief Executive, Public Health Wales
The power and value of an ‘outside in’ view of my world........helped me to recognise I can’t have all the answers and must develop myself and my team to be great facilitators/enablers of the organisation, to define the right questions and the options, then to lead. Andrew Leahy, VP, Operations Best Practice, DHL
I’ve really valued the opportunity to be up in the cloud – above the demands of the day job – a chance to reflect and think about the organisation in a new way. Simon Henley, Managing Director, Europrop
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The visit to Portsmouth was particularly memorable for me because we approached what they were doing from a different perspective than they had used before....a different lens.....ie not engineering or finance, which tends to be how we look at things here, but almost taking a sociological perspective. It was the diversity of thinking that was so rich....we absolutely need this diversity in seeing and thinking.
For me the visit and the work with the Public Health Wales team brought home how important it is to consider policy, not just as a ‘big idea’, but something that has to ‘live’ in the real world and which exists beyond the pages of the documents so many see as the policy. One of the most valuable aspects was the talk about how these different approaches rely upon the marriage of ideas, policy, practice and how delivery obviously important was ‘up there’ as a goal, but just as crucially so was the journey – that’s where the learning is. The challenge to some familiar terms like ‘good’ and ‘best’ practice was important because the comfort such terms provide is not easily or willingly abandoned. Challenge was important in the group, and although gentle, we collectively challenged our own assumptions and world views in a way that, at least for me was transformational. Alex Louis, Communications Management Consultant
and
Change
The Portsmouth visit made me think a lot more about how we create an ‘us’ amongst people with very different perspectives. Malcolm Bray, Strategic Lead for Health and Wellbeing, Crawley Borough Council
These personal reflections also had wider organisational impacts: We are looking at the way we represent complex project management to the business. Ten years ago we put in a series of improvement actions which relied heavily on management review. Over time these have risked becoming a drag... so with
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growing maturity in the organisation we have redressed the balance. We still have the reviews, but realise it’s not just about processes but also about behaviours. One thing that has changed in the organisation is trust... the culture has changed quite significantly. Certain words have become more important... for example words like leadership, experience, judgement, wisdom. The Ashridge experience has reinforced this journey. Erik Johannesen, PMA, BAE Systems
Our participation in the Action Research Consortium helped us to understand what a vision of success would look like in DHL in three years’ time and that Communities of Practice are an entry point (working with teams that have come together and are already incentivised to share knowledge). Building on their demand, we must understand the similarities and differences between them. My team’s role is to enable them by architecting common approaches and tools to support them, help identify and remove organisation/process barriers to knowledge flow, and develop our skills to facilitate them “inventing it here”. Andrew Leahy, DHL
Conclusions....
Leading complex projects: Learning through Action Research
Acknowledging the constant innovations required
in
the
implementation
and
production of outcomes in complex projects and recognising organisational functional silos, this limits aggregation of knowledge. Fresh approaches to education promoting sustainability and cross-discipline awareness (i.e. lenses) are required to develop the next generation of complex project leaders. These will entail innovative teaching and learning design and delivery that depend upon the willingness and capacity of academic and industry practitioners to collaborate across boundaries to develop leaders who are simultaneously cognitively flexible, emotionally intelligent and reflective of experience. International Centre for Complex Project Management Task Force Report, Global Perspectives and the Strategic Agenda to 2025
This is not an inquiry confined to the UK. Complex projects are a global feature. How we develop better methods for evaluating complex projects, learning from the often painful experiences of leading them, speaking more convincingly to all
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…. and questions Whether you are a Head of Profession, Director of Transformation, or a Director of HR, the big questions are therefore these: • How well is the nature of complex projects understood in your organisation? • What is the gap, in your organisation, between ‘knowing’ (received wisdom about how projects ‘should’ be run) and ‘doing’ (the messy realities)? • How well supported are your current complex projects leadership teams in learning on the job? • How confident are you that your development strategies are producing the sort of leaders of complex projects that your organisation needs? • If you’re not yet as confident as you need to be, who are the stakeholders you need to influence and how can you best influence them? • Are your own internal learning and development capabilities up to the challenge of enabling the sort of leadership required?
stakeholders, especially in the political
Building bridges
space,
Our experience points to exciting signs of organisations starting to create new ‘architectures for learning’, in which participants in complex projects are making sense together of their experience, exploring their different perspectives and sharing their learning, across the whole system – what Attwood et al call ‘Public Learning’10.
remain
questions
exercising
governments the world over. The ICCPM, in 2012, commissioned its own research
So what are the big lessons here? Perhaps the most important is that making room for learning is a necessity if we want to improve how we understand and lead complex systems. We have to break it to all the stakeholders in complex projects that there are no ‘instant coffee’8 solutions: the challenge ahead is as much about unlearning habitual behaviours and mindsets as it is about developing new ones. It is in the process of shared inquiry that success is forged.
with the National Audit Office, involving an
The global peak body for research and practice on complex projects, ICCPM, in its 2012 Task Force report makes the point9:
is leading the European Union-sponsored
international, multi-sectoral reference group. The
University of Hull, in a partnership
with European universities, is setting out frameworks for evaluating complex projects factoring in dimensions for sustainability and impact. They note that in countries whose national cultures (the Scandinavians, for
example)
are
inherently
more
‘communitarian’, the practices for dialogue, collaboration and front-end agreements are better developed. The University of Leeds research on understanding and evaluating European Mega Projects.
By so doing, they are growing the capacity for leading projects that are by their nature replete with uncertainty, and where traditional project management techniques are necessary but not sufficient. The need to build (and maintain) bridges between the hitherto separate fields of project management , on the one hand, and more relational approaches to leadership, change and organisation learning on the other hand, has never been more important.
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Leading complex projects: Learning through Action Research
A new book on leading complex projects, edited by Sue Pritchard and Danny Chesterman, will be published by Gower later this year. If you want to discuss any of the issues raised in this article, please contact Sue at sue@suleis.com, or Danny at danny.chesterman@ashridge.org.uk
The Ashridge Centre for Action Research was established in 2010 to create a focus for practitioner-centred action research and inquiry within Ashridge and beyond. Members of the Centre work as action researchers, consultants and educators with a wide range of individuals and organisations. We are passionate about the way action research bridges the divide between thinking and doing, between the world of ideas and the world of messy, everyday action, helping us to act more thoughtfully, more effectively, and more in service of the values that matter to us.
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References 1. Assurance for Major Projects: House of Commons Public Accounts Committee: September 2012 2. Cavanagh, Michael (2012) 2nd Order Project Management, Gower 3. Attwood, Pedler, Pritchard and Wilkinson (2003) Leading Change: A guide to whole systems working, p.30-31, Policy Press 4. American Friends Service Committee published Speak Truth to Power in 1955 at the height of the Cold War. “It has its meaning for us, in part, because it is so concentrated and vivid an expression of an attitude toward government and other institutionalized forms of power. It was the perfect title for a pamphlet challenging the behavior of the two antagonists of the Cold War. They represented raw, terrifying, unreflective and deadly power. What was called for to transform that power was bold and uncompromising truth.” 5. A DHL phrase 6. One that caused much hilarity as an extended metaphor was the old Irish saying “You don’t grow the pig by weighing it…” which points to the obvious fact that having ‘metrics’ for the pig’s growth might be useful data - but it doesn’t tell you anything about how/what you feed the pig to nurture its growth… 7. Shaw, Patricia (2002) Changing Conversations in Organisations: A Complexity Approach to Change, Routledge 8. Hilmer & Donaldson (1996) Management redeemed: debunking the fads that undermine our corporations, New York Free Press 9. Task Force Report, International Centre for Complex Project Management (2012) 10. Attwood et al. Op cit.
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