Published
It’s too easy to condemn infrastructure, engineering and construction projects as simply instruments of our intellectual, rational minds. The implication being that they fail to recognise the human needs behind whatever assets are being created.
Something seems to happen when we make the transition from the original project vision to the process of delivery. Maybe that’s inevitable, given that those who are charged with the delivery are not the same as those who initiated the whole endeavour. Part of this is also associated with the way a vision becomes a channeled, planned, structured, budgeted set of activities … a project; something quasi-scientific, controlled and data-driven.
There are advantages to this transition. Emotions make us impulsive, liable to change and open to cognitive bias; less clinical in our processes of reflection, risk seeking and liable to other behaviours which may be dangerous for any project.
But we also lose a great deal too. This afternoon, the Major Projects Association are running a seminar: Reflecting on CoP 26 – What Next. The event is designed to capture our thoughts on last Autumn’s international summit and provide a springboard, on the one-hand to pursue the plans agreed in Glasgow and on the other to continue to push for further commitments to mitigate and reverse the impact of climate change.
Inherent in the timing and design of the event is a recognition of the shortcoming to emotional impulse. It tends to be short-lived, which means that we struggle to sustain the enthusiasm and momentum it generates as a lasting force for change. One of the presentations in the seminar, from Pippa-Gibbs Joubert, is called “Are We All Agreed?” Pippa’s presentation will explore the dangers of inertia and the power of the status quo. If we agree on something and we are committed to changing it, why is it that we continually struggle to translate this into meaningful and sustained action?
Like pretty much everything else in major projects, progress and success requires that we achieve a balance between apparently opposing states (in this case, states of mind). We need the rational, intellectual left-brain to take an idea and break it into deliverable chunks that are budgeted, scheduled and planned. But we also need to impulsive, creative, emotional, right-brain which is what generates engagement, motivation, commitment and self-belief. Without this, an inspirational vision can all too quickly become a bureaucratic project.
Project management is very good at all of the skills, processes and structure associated with the right-brain activities but how do we nurture and sustain the left-brain activities and revive the emotional state on a regular basis? And what are the opportunities and processes for doing this repeatedly, on a project that may last decades, involve a steady turn-over of staff and rapidly grow to a level of scale and complexity that we become buried in the detail?