Published
During the recording for our April Podcast (Reimagining Global Supply Chains) Professor Mike Lewis emphasized the dangers of looking at what is a complex system (the supply network) as a simple chain. For two, immediate reasons: 1. Because a chain is a linear concept which is hugely misleading in the way it represents the connections between the different players and 2. Because individuals (and organizations) tend to be very ego-centric and see themselves as at the head of chain which ignores what happens after their project or the way that their activities and their decisions have significant and far-reaching impact on many of the myriad of other projects that are already underway or waiting to be started.
Just as the supply chain is a dangerously inappropriate form of linear thinking so the idea of a project as ‘a unique endeavour with a beginning, middle and an end’, which is an idea that has defined project definitions for the last 50 years and beyond, is something we need to abandon (and fast).
The risks associated with this way of thinking are well-established:
- it encourages an unhealthy level of focus on the project itself and encourages short-termism and narrowness of thinking so that decisions are made on the basis of what’s good for the project, with little if any consideration of the projects that might follow or indeed of the users and the operational phase, or the benefits and their realisation;
- its too easy to muddle together the genuinely new parts of a project with what you have done before, which has two potentially equally damaging consequences. On the one-hand, under the guise that we we are doing ‘has never been done before’ we continue to reinvent the wheel rather than making a serious attempt to adopt the breakthrough’s in organization or process from other projects. On the other hand, we can deliberately ignore the innovative and unknown elements of a new project, ‘because we know how to do projects, we’ve done them before’, which is fertile ground for optimism bias and a charter for ignoring the need to change;
- the ‘unique, time-bounded’ way of thinking also encourages us to underplay and discount the significance of project initiation and the value of early conversations. Because we treat projects as ‘transactions’ we build a project organization from scratch, each time and ignore the importance of relationships, culture and trust. Since the relationship with the suppliers is transactional, what’s the point of having an early conversation?
Maybe we need to reframe the old project definitions so that we understand and emphasize everything that happened before the project; that will happen after the project and, indeed, what is happening concurrently? The form of words might not be as neat as ‘a unique endeavour with a beginning, middle and an end’ but maybe the performance of our projects might improve and we might be better at delivering value.