It sounds simple, and yet these elements are extremely hard to get right in practice because the building blocks of effective collaboration – starting with basic conversation – are often not taken into consideration.
Projects fail when there is a lack of agreement or no shared belief to motivate the commitments necessary to drive action. And this happens at an astonishing rate – more than half the time by some estimates – with huge repercussions for business and the wider economy.
This white paper, which advances a practical theory of human collaboration to boost project success rates, is written from a practitioner’s perspective. The work stems from Dr Day’s observations during his early career in IT in the 1980s and 1990s that mainstream project management is not founded on explicit theory, which undermines its ability to create ‘manageability’ in complex situations.
A good theory enables people to understand, predict, and master situations they need to manage. However, if the theories people are depending on are flawed or missing altogether, they will struggle to cope, and life can seem unmanageable.
Mainstream project management methodologies tell people how to manage projects. They provide tools and techniques for gathering requirements, often assuming the existence of predefined business rules and based on unquestioned assumptions. What’s missing is a better understanding of the why. In fact, there has been no explicit theory to help project participants understand why they need to do things underpinning mainstream project management – until now.
Dr Day’s ground-breaking theory is not about doing project management better, but about starting again with a whole new approach and premise that puts effective conversation between human beings at the centre of the process.
The ability to converse and to think about what other people are thinking is one of the things that sets humans apart from all other animals. By the age of four, children are already skilled at understanding what’s going on in the minds of others. However, mind reading can be disastrously inaccurate leading to misunderstandings and potential dysfunctionality, which is why meaningful conversation – to check assumptions among other things – is indispensable.
The paper argues that the success of projects depends largely on the design of the conversations in which project commitments are made, and that ‘contagious manageability’ can be achieved by redesigning the cognitive environment of the conversation system to create a ‘small world’ where it is possible and easier to achieve a workably accurate understanding of what is going on in everyone’s mind. As such, this practical theory of human collaboration has far-reaching implications for all situations where cooperation between humans is necessary in both the professional and personal sphere.