HAIL CAESAR! THE STOICS GUIDE TO PROJECT MANAGEMENT. Part II: Planning for the future
In the second part of our trilogy, we return to Marcus Aurelius’s ‘Meditations’ and what Stoic philosophy can teach us as modern-day project managers. Part II of our trilogy covers one of the greatest lessons that project managers need to learn if we wish to remain effective in our profession – and that lesson is:
You can’t plan for everything…
Traditionally, project managers have considered a major part of their role to be one of planning and control. The sense that we need to be in control of the project stems from our discipline’s roots in a body of theory known as ‘Transformational Production Management’. This body of theory was critical to the development of project management because it provided us with many fundamental tools such as the Critical Path Method (CPM), Work Breakdown Structures (WBS), Quality Assurance (QA) processes and most of the reductionist techniques that underpin our knowledge of planning and control.
The unfortunate side-effect of this however, is the subliminal message that the discipline sends out to practitioners and Sponsors, that the role of the project manager is to control the project. We, either explicitly or implicitly, transmit the message that our role is to to control the project so that it achieves the time, cost and quality constraints that we – the planners – set out in our original budgets and Gantt charts. This message sounds reasonable, but in setting this as the expectation of our role in the project, we forget a fundamental principle of Stoicism:
“…The world is nothing but change…everything is transitory. Nature loves nothing more than to alter what already exists…” (4.3, 4.33 ).
When thinking about his ability to control his environment Marcus Aurelius notes, “..time is a river, a violent current of events…” (4.43). An interesting insight when you consider that, not only was Aurelius the Emperor of the known world at that time, but he was considered by all Romans to be an incarnate god. A 'deity' who could have his every wish attended to – from the slaying those he took a dislike to, to enslaving entire countries with the might of his army. And yet, in the midst of totalitarian power the likes of which none of us will ever know, Aurelius realizes the indomitable power of change, and recognizes his lack of ability to control it.
This ‘ruler of the world’ accepted what many project managers do not – unexpected events impact your world regardless of how well you plan.
Aurelius admits to himself, that his role is not to control the ‘Empire’. Empires, like projects, are complex systems filled with multiple actors, unknown and unknowable information, they are plagued with primary and secondary feedback loops that make change inevitable. So instead of trying to control these changes we, as project managers, like Aurelius, need to accept this is the reality of our environment and work out how to manage these changes and their impacts.
Another interesting insight regarding the impact that changes can have on our projects comes from Aurelius’s comments that “…there is nothing bad in undergoing change…or good emerging from it…” (4.42). As project management practitioners who have learned to accept the inevitability of change, we must learn Stoicism’s next lesson – that change itself is neither good nor bad; it is how we handle the change that determines its ultimate impact.
This is perhaps one of the most misrepresented of the Stoics teachings. Stoics are, above all else, realists. You may have heard of people ‘stoically’ pressing on in the face of untold hardship, which gives the impression that persistence in and of itself is a Stoic virtue. This is true in one sense, but also a complete misunderstanding of the teaching. Stoicism is not about pressing on with a total disregard for the ‘will of the gods’. Rather, Stoicism teaches that a person should accept change for what it is, without attempting to decide if this is ‘good’ or ‘bad’. A change to the best-laid plans is simply that - a change. Not a change for the better, or a change for the worse – just a change, and since things have changed we need to take a fresh look at our project based on this new information and decide what the next course of action should be.
…but you can know what happens next.
As much as we would love everything to go as we have planned, the ‘fates’ will decide for us whether this will be our lot. However, as Marcus Aurelius shows us, having change impact your plans should not leave you with no idea what to do next. In fact, only those who accept change can see that the seeds of the future are sown in the fields of the past.
As Aurelius says:
"… What follows coheres with what went before. Not like a random catalogue whose order is imposed upon it arbitrarily, but logically connected. And just as what exists is ordered and harmonious, what comes into being betrays an order too. Not a mere sequence, but an astonishing concordance..." (4.43)
Stoics take great care in understanding the world as it is, not as they would like it to be. In doing so, they became quite astute at perceiving the future options that life could, not would but could, take. For modern-day project managers this is an extremely important skill. Who among us has not had to predict the potential outcomes that could occur as a result of a change to our plans? We pride ourselves on foreseeing and mitigating risks, we create registers to track issues that have the potential to impact the outcomes of our projects. In doing so, we don’t select random risks such as the threat of Ebola on our construction project in Brisbane.
No!, we know that the seeds of the future are already sown in the fields of the past. We know that decisions made in the past, by the stakeholders, that will later impact the budget. We know that the decision to select imported materials has the potential to result in schedule overruns. Our training and experience has provided us with a gift of foresight – we know when today’s decisions will impact tomorrow’s outcomes. Maybe not exactly, but we can have a very educated guess. As project managers grounded in reality we know that the future is not a complete mystery, it is just an extension of what we already know.
Key Points:
Part II of our trilogy has focused on the teachings of Stoicism by showing us:
- You can’t really control your project - But you can predict and plan.
- The future is not a total mystery to a project manager who understands that the tomorrow’s 'harvest are sown from the fields of past decisions’ and
- Change is neither ‘good’ nor ‘bad’ – change is just ‘change’.
Coming up
In the final chapter of “Hail Caesar! – The Stoics Guide to Project Management” when we will provide some practical tips for modern-day project managers