 Reforming Project Management |
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Thursday, July 10, 2003
Project e-Tip of the Week
Tuesday, July 08, 2003
Care for Critical Conversations
I always thought that when one writes a paper it is to stand on its own. Well, that certainly wasn't the case with Lauri Koskela's and Greg Howell's paper The Underlying Theory of Project Management is Obsolete. It took me five days of postings of my commentary Notes on Underlying Theory. It appears Greg's and my paper on Foundations of Lean Construction: Linguistic Action will require a similar discussion and commentary. Please join in. Let's start with what we mean by linguistic action. Most of the action we take happens with some movement of our body. I reach for a mug of beer and raise it to my lips swallowing it in one gulp. (Ok, only in my younger days.) We refer to this as physical action. A second type of action occurs when we put our mind to a task. Reading is an action that is accompanied by eye movements and page turning or head movements to focus on different parts of the text. The action of reading is unobservable to others. Solving a math problem and recalling a fact use similar capacities. Let's refer to these as mental actions. Many of our creative actions are a combination of these two types. For instance working with clay at a potter's wheel calls on both physical and mental capacities for an artifact to emerge from the lump of clay. A third type of action is linguistic action. It is different from the other two in that the action occurs in speaking and listening. For instance, the asking of a question is the act of questioning. Similarly, speaking an assessment is assessing. The action and the speaking (or listening) are one and the same. There are five basic speech-acts each with variations. I'll go into more detail on each one in following postings.
With these speech-acts humans constitute their world. While the physical matter exists independent of the observer of the matter, it doesn't exist as the matter until it is named as such and accepted by a community. (I know that is a philosophical; it's supposed to be.) For instance, a coffee table can be both a coffee table and a fortress but not at the same moment or for the same person engaged in action. Years ago, my young children would crawl under our coffee table engaging with it as their fort. It was sturdy enough that they stood on it using it as a platform of attack for their enemy (read younger brother). When we visited Grandma's house I would be a little uneasy. Grandma had a similar coffee table. Interestingly, the children never crawled under or on top of her coffee table. It's not that they were better behaved at Grandma's house. They still found ways to attack their enemies. It was only that they understood that at Grandma's house that the wooden object in the living room was a coffee table, not a fort. It is where Grandma served cookies and we all congregated for Grandpa's funny stories. The example of the coffee table shows what it is that is distinguished is wrapped up in the actions that we engage in with that object. Please be clear about this. I am talking about semantics. Yes, it is just semantics, but that is what is so powerful about having language. Semantics allows like-minded people to coordinate with one another using speech-acts to accomplish what one can not do alone. Without semantics and speech-acts there would be no bridges, no water treatment plants, no schools, no churches, no health clubs. They are all physical constructions with significant variations to be recognized as one from the other allowing for different classes of action to occur within. In language we create them and with language we engage with each other within them. It's time to link this to project delivery. Our success on projects calls on a facility and competence for engaging in particular kinds of critical conversations. Those conversations include:
Monday, July 07, 2003
Here's the Paper on Linguistic Action Theory
Foundations of Lean Construction: Linguistic Action, by Hal Macomber and Gregory Howell, to be presented at the International Group for Lean Construction's (IGLC) 11th Annual Conference, July 22, 2003. How did I get started on this? I responded to Lauri Koskela's call for papers on project management theory. I just had to do it. He referred to my blog in his paper. New communities of practice While I was hesitant to propose a paper, having never written for this kind of community, I was convinced that I would offer a different perspective on projects from the ones offered by people who studied civil engineering and construction management. Having begun my writing on a linguistic action basis for project management, I thought there just might be something there. Emboldened, or just stupid, I began. So I wrote the paper in the style of the papers presented in the previous ten years, not my style, but an accepted style. I encourage you to read Greg's and my paper so you can participate in a discussion. For the next 4 or 5 days I'll discuss various aspects of the paper. Here's the funny thing: once submitted and accepted, Greg and I began speculating on how I would present it. After weeks of discussion we concluded we wrote the wrong paper! Not that there's something wrong with what we said. We just omitted to say what we contend is of most importance. Oh well...I'll just have to say it in this weblog (and when I present). Meet Me in Indianapolis
I'll be at Coachville's Certified Coach Intensive in Indianapolis July 25 & 26. You can't beat the price, just $179, or the location, right at the airport. Hope to meet you there! Don't know about Coachville? It is the premier organization for providing training and education for professional coaches -- of all types. Can't make Indi? How about Memphis or Minneapolis on July 18 & 19, or Seattle on Aug 1 & 2? Sunday, July 06, 2003
Shut Up and Listen
Team Building Made Easy: Shut Up & Listen, a Business 2.0 interview with Noel Tichy in the July issue. Unfortunately, Business 2.0 left this article out of their online version. It accompanied the pullout section on The Business 2.0 Dream Team, their picks for the best of leaders from all the business functions. So now you have a good reason to subscribe, just $7.49/Yr! Noel Tichy is best-known for the work he did at GE creating the workout process for their Crotonville training center. Tichy describes the success of workout coming from people who came to speak with the boss unafraid to share their views. That would result in a nonhierarchical exchange of criticism and ideas. While the interview was about company leaders the advice seems to fit the project leader too. Tichy advises to build your team then aggressively listen: (T)he leader has to use command and control to build the team -- but once it's together, he has to share that power, becoming totally nonhierarchical and participatory so that team members speak with one voice and become leaders themselves. He indicates that whether your company or team operates conventionally or not, when we convene a team that includes a number of companies we are likely to include people who have been systematically shut down. (C)ompanies...still employ the old top-down system, where management wants to just talk and not listen Members become alienated, no one wants to talk because no one wants to listen, everyone becomes increasingly misaligned, and the company becomes progressively dumber. And that's still the majority of companies out there. Each project team and its organization is temporary. Take the time to organize it based on the strengths of the team members then systematically listen. For more on this read (5R) Protocol for a Listening Workplace. Visit the Archives for more postings |
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