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PM meets pop culture
OFFLINE LINE Where project management meets popular culture
Ever feel like you’re getting gazumped when your project turns out to be more important than people thought? Fed up of senior project managers steaming in with their size-12s, telling you how to do things? Your hero might just be Basil Brown, writes Richard Young
The Dig
Netflix’s The Dig has been one of the streaming hits of the pandemic. Our project hero is Basil Brown (Ralph Fiennes), a farmer’s son and experienced excavator who’s hired in 1939 by landowner Edith Pretty (Carey Mulligan – the project sponsor) to explore the Saxon archaeological site Sutton Hoo, which lies in her garden in Suffolk.
The project management lessons start from the outset. The first? Get to the point. Edith’s committed to the project but not terribly knowledgeable. She knows what she wants – the mounds explored – but apart from that, she’s
a little clueless. That’s a dream for a project manager: give me a goal, licence to operate, reasonable resources and we’ll get on just fine.
Basil is no-nonsense, too. At the meeting, he sets out his credentials – horny-handed son of the Suffolk soil who knows the land better than anyone – and probes Edith’s motivations to ensure there’s no misconceptions. A project manager should have confidence in their abilities – and if the sponsor trusts them, too, they’re less likely to butt in.
She does try. Reviewing the mounds, she nudges him towards the one she thinks shows promise. He explains exactly why he’s choosing the locations for his initial digs – and she lets him get on with it. She trusts him. (We’ll come back to this decision later…) There’s one other lesson from the early exchanges: don’t undersell yourself. Edith offers the same wage Ipswich Museum paid him for excavations. These academic archaeologists – representing a corporate bureaucracy – undervalue the self-taught Basil, so he tells her he won’t work for less than £2 a week. Eventually, realising he’s crucial to the project, she agrees.
He also makes clear his requirements: manpower (a couple of assistants), logistics (bed and board on-site) and control.
Dig the whole day through
Basil gets to work, but the bureaucrats aren’t far behind. They nag him about suspending Edith’s dig to work on a more promising project. Edith insists he should be free to choose what to work on. Naturally, he stays with her – why switch horses to the bossy corporate programme managers when this project is all his? It’s not long before he repays her trust.
A good project manager knows when to stick to their guns and when to adapt. Basil realises one of the mounds – the one Edith wanted to excavate from the start – has an unusual shape. And he suddenly sees that earlier grave-robbers will likely have dug their shaft in the wrong place as a result, meaning the treasures inside could still be intact. It’s not exactly agile project management. But it’s a great lesson: when you realise your stage gate is poorly defined or won’t take you where you need to go next, don’t soldier on bloody-mindedly. Recalibrate and reset. Sometimes, listening to the instincts of others can be the right course of action, even when they don’t have your professional skills.
Mounds of evidence
There’s some high drama when Basil is buried under soil from the first trench he digs in the new site. Actually, he’s pretty rigorous about project safety and is constantly warning people about getting too close to the diggings. Is it too cheap to say project managers should always take their own health and safety as seriously as they take others’?
Basil realises that early finds in the mound are consistent with a large ship burial. That makes his project suddenly more interesting to the ‘suits’. Of course, he informs his sponsor first – he knows that relationship is key, and not just for the (totally fictional) romantic subplot.
Local archaeologist (let’s style him as a regional manager in our corporate parallel) James Reid Moir attempts to muscle in when news of the find spreads. But with the backing of Edith, Basil rebuffs his offer of ‘help’. And who can blame a project manager for wanting to keep control of their baby? Edith is great here. She faces intense pressure from someone in authority, but backs her chap all the way, even offering him resources of her own (her cousin Rory – who becomes the centre of another fictional romantic subplot…) to help with the uptick in project work.
Another lesson, then: don’t automatically hand over a project that has taken on new significance – see what you can do with the resources at hand
and the support of a sponsor. Go as far as you can with your own skills and personnel.
A romantic subplot between the winsome Mulligan and craggy Fiennes complicates this project. Inset: projects need doers like Peggy Piggott
Buried under work
Sadly, there really are some projects that turn out to be much bigger than their initial project manager’s skills and resources. And most will know the inevitable feeling that a successful, transformative project will attract the attention of glory-hunting executives. In Basil and Edith’s case, it’s a chap called Charles Phillips, a Cambridge academic who’s well connected to the British Museum. He sniffs the value of the ship burial and uses regulations on ‘finds of national significance’ to take control.
At this point, there’s nothing that even project sponsor Edith can do. It’s her land – but once we’re into rules and regs, it’s a damage limitation job. Edith’s sickness is getting worse; Basil resents being bossed around and mistrusted (despite her ongoing support); and Phillips has brought in a whole team for the dig, meaning Basil can’t even do
the great project mentoring work with Edith’s young son Robert.
The question, then, is: how should a project manager handle their emotions when their hard work gets hijacked? Basil reacts badly at first, leaving in a huff. But his much-neglected wife May convinces him that his duty is to his craft, the project… and to his sponsor Edith.
The project comes first
There’s added spice when war breaks out. Everyone knows the dig will probably have to be suspended when hostilities occur, and that, in part, is what convinces Basil to return to the team. As May explains: “It means something – it’ll last longer than any damned war.” And truth be told, Phillips the interloper is a pretty damn good project manager himself. For example, knowing his own personal limits, he brings in a team with diverse skills, well suited to the project. And when Edith confronts him about his snobbery in not letting Basil make a more intimate contribution to the dig, he sees sense and welcomes our hero as a more involved member of the team.
It’s not entirely clear whether he’s making a concession to her as sponsor or being more open-minded about Basil’s capabilities. But the decision pays off when it’s his expertise and instinct that give the project a new dimension as he uncovers evidence that this is an unprecedented find.
Lessons learned
The project comes to fruition as Phillips and his team celebrate the find as one of historic significance. Edith still fights for her rights as sponsor – contesting ownership of the treasures at an inquest, for example. But eventually she agrees the British Museum is the best place for the discoveries, and as war looms, she concedes the project to Phillips –
extracting a promise that Basil will get full recognition for his work as project manager when the finds are exhibited. He doesn’t, of course – corporate takes full credit without the project manager getting a look in. C’est la vie…
But in a touching scene towards the end, we see the original project manager personally taking care to preserve the ship site before the dig is covered over for the duration. Basil is more than just project manager for Sutton Hoo. He speaks sincerely to Edith of being “part of something continuous, from the first hand-print on the wall of a cave.” There’s a project management lesson there, too. If we’re serious about it as a profession, it’s not enough to develop skills and instincts like Basil – or even specialist disciplines within industries. We need to remember what makes great project management from generations before – applying lessons learned from the whole profession, not just our own experiences.
DIGGING INTO LEADERSHIP TYPES
Four years ago, Carsten Lund Pedersen and Thomas Ritter described four types of project leader in the Harvard Business Review. How do the characters in The Dig map onto them?
THE PROPHET
Grand visions requiring a leap of faith IN THE DIG: Edith Pretty, project sponsor. She has no idea what’s in the mounds, but feels it must be important. Sometimes, a hunch or obsession is vital for a project.
THE GAMBLER
Bets followed up by locking in rewards IN THE DIG: Basil Brown, project leader. Educated guessing is like smart gambling – using your knowledge of the terrain to skew projects risks in your favour.
THE EXPERT
Analytical progress driven by sound advice IN THE DIG: Charles Phillips, PMO leader. Deep subjectmatter knowledge is often crucial to a project’s success – and even to realising when it’s on the right track.
THE EXECUTOR
Locked-in gains consistent with strategic plan IN THE DIG: Peggy Piggott, project manager. Projects can’t progress without the doers – people who bring skills and experience but ensure the work of visionaries gets done.
