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WINTER 2001
21
Leadership and Management in Engineering
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.
SOURCES OF POWER:HOW PEOPLE MAKE
DECISIONS
By Gary A. Klein; Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press,
1999; 352 pages; $21.95.
s a practitioner of project management, I am con-
stantly trying to learn how to be more effective.
The odds are against me. Some studies claim that
more than half of all projects are late and that almost every
project goes over budget. This disturbs me, since we advo-
cate a “lessons learned” exercise for every project—a post-
project review that attempts to determine what went wrong,
why it went wrong, and what could have been done differ-
ently that would have prevented the wrong from occurring.
My professional angst led me to a psychologist, Gary A.
Klein, the author of Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions
(MIT Press, 1999). Klein has studied decision making in a
variety of professions, from fire fighting to nursing. He tries
to understand “how people handle all of the typical confu-
sions and pressures of their environment, such as missing
information, time constraints, vague goals, and changing
conditions,” he says. If that description sounds like your
project, read on.
According to Klein, while decision making seems to
favor the experienced person (an obvious conclusion), the
experience must often be put into context to be made mean-
ingful (a not-so-obvious conclusion). In the book, he cites a
group of midwestern firefighters trying to battle an oil tank
fire. They had experience fighting fires—mostly barn and
garage fires—but the different context of the fire (an oil tank)
meant their experience was not meaningful and they ended
up calling in consultants to extinguish the fire. “Years of
experience are not beneficial if we cannot make meaning of
and apply the experience,” says Klein. “That is why building
a meaningful experience base is important.”
For the profession of project management, that meaning-
ful experience base, if it exists at all, takes the form of lessons
learned. This is our attempt to extract and capture knowl-
edge for future use. My attempts to relate Klein’s work to
project management have led me to conclude that we need
to continue doing lessons-learned exercises, but we should be
doing them earlier and more frequently.
For most projects, the lessons-learned task is literally an
afterthought, done at the end of a project (if the project hasn’t
been canceled because of delays or overruns). By this time,
much of what happened has been lost. Summarizing lessons
learned earlier and at more frequent intervals throughout the
project increases the likelihood of recording highly accurate
information. The key here, according to Klein, is “to reduce
the time between the occurrence and the outcome of an
event.”
The reason for carrying out the exercise more often is to
increase the amount of data you collect. That doesn’t mean
that the more data the better (we’re after knowledge here,
not data); rather it means increasing the chances that you’ll
capture “a prior case with a known outcome and a semi-
known set of causes,” says Klein. More frequent recording of
lessons learned may increase the probability of linking cause
to effect, although that is never guaranteed. The purpose of
all this is to build experience that can be applied to future
projects to get better results.
But a better experience base is worthless if it is not
applied. Getting it applied involves changing top manage-
ment, and there have been thousands of articles written
about that topic. A better way for our profession to apply les-
sons learned to the legions of people doing the daily work of
project management is to provide training that is based more
on case studies.
Case-based training focuses on the practice of project
management. It allows students to use their experience (or
lack thereof) to interpret what happened in a certain case:
why the project was late, how the scope of the project
increased, and so forth. While training is still no substitute
for experience, case-based training serves to reduce the real-
world delay between event and feedback and can sometimes
link cause and effect more directly. Klein believes that inex-
perience is a greater factor in bad decisions than faulty rea-
soning, and case-based training—used in the professions of
medicine and law—provides a way to simulate experience in
a shorter period of time.
An old joke defines insanity as “doing the same thing and
expecting different results.” It appears that our traditional
lessons-learned exercise and teaching methods haven’t done
much to improve our track record. I suggest we consider
changing them, because according to the statistics we still
have a lot to learn.
—JOHN SULLIVAN
PMP
Dayton, Ohio
A
BOOKS
Leadership Manage. Eng. 2001.1:21-21.
Downloaded from ascelibrary.org by 54.152.109.166 on 11/05/15. For personal use only.
