HAIL CAESAR! THE STOICS GUIDE TO PROJECT MANAGEMENT. PART III: Practical Advice for today's PMs

In the final part of our trilogy we return to Marcus Aurelius’s ‘Meditations’.

Practical tips for Stoic project management.

 After almost 20 years as a project management professional, I am amazed at how some of the fundamental teachings of Stoicism can have such a practical application for modern-day project management. In this final part of our trilogy, I wanted to take you through some of my favourite practical tips.

But before I do I want, once again to remind you of the magnitude of the man who writes these passages. These are the words of Caesar Marcus Aurelius, a literal ‘deity’ to the Roman people, an Emperor, arguably the most powerful, most revered, most venerated man of his time. This is the man who reaches down through the ages and bestows these practical tips for project management.

When writing emails, letters and reports:

 In the ‘gratitudes’ Aurelius states that:

 “…From Rusticus, I learned not to be sidetracked by my interest in rhetoric. Not to write treaties…[but] to write straightforward letters…” (1.07)

 As project managers we often have large amounts of data available to us for managing, monitoring and controlling our project. Much of that information is important – to us. It is not necessarily important to the project Sponsor, the project team or the stakeholders. When writing, our goal should be to limit the information contained in the correspondence only to that which the reader needs to know. We add value to the project, not by how much data we have, but how well we can condense and distill that into information and key points which facilitate the decision making process.

We need to help the readers of our correspondence and reports see the diamonds in the coalfield, and we do that by clearing as much of the coal away as possible.

When mentoring project management professionals, I implore them to use technical jargon sparingly in their correspondence. Technical jargon can be a very effective communication medium when you can be sure that everyone hearing or reading that communication knows exactly what the terms mean. If not, then jargon only does one of two things, either:

1. It isolates those who don’t understand it, or worse yet;
2. It confuses people about key issues.

I have found that the best policy when dealing with multi-faceted groups of people ( i.e. Sponsors, designers, contractors, project teams and stakeholders) is to

communicate important issues as plainly as possible.

You don’t need to demonstrate that you know what’s happening in the project, that is a given due to your position as the project manager. What you do need to do is to make sure that others know what’s happening - and that means putting difficult, sometimes highly technical issues, into terms that they can clearly understand.

And how do we achieve this?

By following Aurelius’s advice to ensure that our communications are clear, succinct and straightforward.

Be the realist in the group:

 If anything, Marcus Aurelius was a realist. He didn’t sugar-coat reality and he had little time for people that did. He even writes to himself,

 “..[do] not to fall for every smooth talker…investigate and analyze with understanding and logic… [do] not to waste time on nonsense…but be ready to hear unwelcome truths… always to define whatever it is we perceive - to trace its outline - so we can see what it really is: its substance. Stripped bare. As a whole, unmodified, and to call it by its name - the thing itself and its components…Nothing is so conducive to spiritual growth as this capacity for logical and accurate analysis of everything that happens to us..."

 As project managers we must be realists. Let others in the project team create overly ambitious timelines or scopes that have no discernible links to the the tight budget.

We, more than any other discipline, must be the voice of cold, hard, reality.

There is nothing to be gained by hiding errors, mistakes or failures, or by silently accepting impossible constraints and expectations in the hope that time will magically make them achievable. We need to see and hear the painful truths and we need to see and hear them before anyone else. Why? Because as Aurelius explains, once we have heard the unwanted truth we can see its substance - we can see it for what it is, and only then can we begin to form a plan to resolve the issue.

 In my experience, one of the greatest traps project management professionals fall into is to tell their client or Sponsor what they want to hear, regardless of the harsh realities of the project. This is not to say that we should put up roadblocks to the project’s progress or see undue risks in everything – rather that we have the clarity of thought to see things as they really are, so that we can logically and accurately analyze their impact on our project. Bad news is not like wine, it does not get better with age. My advice, like Aurelius’s, is when there is bad news on the project - hear it early, see it for what it really is and then plan the best course of action to remove, minimize or mitigate the problem.

The last word:

 In order to bring this trilogy to a close, I wanted to dispel one last myth regarding Stoicism. Many people who only touch the surface of Stoicism often mistake it for a mirthless and bland philosophy that encourages its adherents to just grin and bear everything that life throws at them. However, this is not true. Stoicism encourages us to see ourselves, our lives and our contributions to humanity with clarity. Not to diminish the value of what we can achieve as human beings containing a ‘...spark of the divine...’, but to see what really matters in life.

 So in conclusion, I will let Marcus Aurelius speak to us once again as reminds himself of what really matters in this life. For us, as modern project management professionals, the message is just as important in life as it is to managing our projects. Marcus Aurelius writes:

"…[Live with ] Self -control and resistance to distractions. Showing optimism in adversity…doing your job without whining… A sense of humour...[remembering that] if you do the job in a principled way, with diligence, energy and patience, if you keep yourself free of distractions, and keep the spirit inside you undamaged… if you embrace this life without fear or expectation…you can find fulfillment…then your life will be happy. No one can prevent that..."

I hope you enjoyed Hail Caesar! A Stoics Guide to Project Management. If you would like to discuss anything you have read in more detail, please feel free to PM me on LinkedIn.

Greg.