How to Not Succeed with a Project Implementation

After a stalled project implementation, the leadership team of a large international airport has, at the urging of the senior project manager, decided to bring in a team coach with experience in managing change to help them explore the issue. Although the leadership team has openly stated their commitment to this innovative project that would replace an aging application, the coach is curious about what’s going on below the surface, and decides to bring in an exercise to provoke their thinking, and also lighten the gloomy mood. This exercise is based on the work of the Conscious Leadership Group. As background reading, they have viewed the “Hidden Iceberg” video to understand the difference between conscious and unconscious commitments - https://conscious.is/video/whats-your-hidden-iceberg.

The coach has posed the challenge; ‘imagine you’re tasked to describe, in dramatic detail, all of the ways you as a leadership team have unconsciously committed to not succeeding with this project’. After the shock subsides, the leadership team gets creative, and comes up with several ways that they would advise a re-enactment of this in a dramatic setting:

1. The Endless Meeting Cycle: Leadership has mastered the art of scheduling back-to-back meetings to discuss the implementation, ensuring that every detail is scrutinized to the point of exhaustion. These meetings are so frequent and lengthy that they leave no time for actual implementation work, effectively stalling progress.
2. The Perfectionist's Paradise: Stakeholders have set such high standards for the application's performance and features that it becomes an unattainable goal. By constantly requesting additional features and improvements, they create an endless loop of development, preventing the application from ever being ready for production.
3. The Approval Abyss: The project is trapped in a bureaucratic maze where every minor decision requires multiple layers of approval. The approval process is so convoluted and time-consuming that by the time a decision is made, the initial requirements have changed, necessitating a restart.
4. The Blame Game Bonanza: Whenever progress stalls, leadership and stakeholders engage in a lively game of finger-pointing, ensuring that responsibility for any delays is always shifted elsewhere. This culture of blame creates an environment of fear and defensiveness, where team members are more focused on avoiding criticism than on driving the project forward.
5. The Criticism Carousel: Every proposal or plan for moving the project into production is met with a whirlwind of criticism. Stakeholders take turns highlighting perceived flaws and potential risks, creating an atmosphere where no plan is ever deemed good enough. This relentless cycle of critique ensures that any momentum is swiftly halted, keeping the project in a perpetual state of limbo.

The point of this exercise? To put it simply, they now have a set of unconscious commitments which they can examine and ask questions led by curiosity, like, what are we getting by keeping these patterns going?’, and are we prepared to take radical responsibility for these issues? This opens the opportunity to create breakthrough solutions that will stop these issues from continuing to recycle, and finally get them the to the finish line.