License to mistakes

I have made again a bunch of mistakes since my previous post 4 days ago. Mastery in any field is paved by them. Think about a chess player who tries to become a champion without making any mistakes. Projects are no different. In fact, because of their unique and complex nature as well as changing stakeholders they are probably more prone to mistakes than many other fields of life.

The title equals the theme for Project days ('Projektip?iv?t') 2016, one of the best Project days I have attended to. Of course I have not always participated, but quite often at least had a glimpse on the materials. It is still quite rare to discuss openly even within the organization about the mistakes, but that year's event had quite a few examples of failed projects and the lessons that could be drawn from them.

Relatively novel approaches such as agile development acknowledge the mistakes and include mechanisms for rapid learning and corrections, if required.

Authority bias, which is the tendency to attribute greater accuracy to the opinion of an authority figure and be more influenced by that opinion, might discourage people from bringing out mistakes, leading to inefficient and unprofitable projects at best and to disasters at worst. Couple of earlier posts have treated the famous accidents of Titanic and Columbia.

A person acting as a project manager or having an authority position should think carefully what type of message he or she sends about the tolerance for mistakes. There are also debriefing mechanisms such as?STEALTH, which can be used to avoid authority bias and to create the proper tone for the workshop.

Next post will follow after a couple of more mistakes.