This is a huge area, but is all based on the simple idea that one way to tackle uncertainty is to learn faster and be more exible. That can involve getting set up to learn faster, doing things to generate learning, getting more feedback faster, making use of learning more often, and creating exibility to respond to what you learn.
Although this is common sense it is surprising how often organizations do none of this, instead carrying on as if they know everything from the outset and do not need to learn or adapt.
Getting set to learn:
• If you promise your boss something will happen in a certain way and then you start revising your priorities and methods as you go along that looks out of control. In contrast, if you say at the start that you will be monitoring events and progress frequently and adjusting to take advantage of new information then that looks like good, responsible management! More seriously:
Documents like approved plans and agreed contracts need to be written in a way that gives room for learning and adjustment or, better still, requires them.
Plans need to allocate time and resources to learning and adjusting.
People need to understand that this is expected of them.
Often, the whole structure of a plan needs to be designed to create a situation in which you can learn quickly and have the exibility to adapt instead of being stuck with the consequences of old decisions.
Finally, it helps to allocate responsibilities to people in a way that allows
exibility. For example, if you have a set of ve products to manage, then allocating a manager to each product creates a defender for each product who may well block attempts to manage the products as a portfolio. You may want the product management team to pull support for products that are failing and give it to the successes, but the managers will resist. In contrast, if managers are responsible for the portfolio they will be more willing to change things.
Doing things to learn more, faster:
• Although much can be achieved by
retrospectively trying to make sense of what has been happening it is hard to learn how the world works and what you can do to in uence it by monitoring trends. You have to experiment. In other words, try different things and see what happens. Making lots of small, quick experiments is a common management strategy that you can see, for example, guiding the development of websites and the selection of new products. Our ability to spot potential winners is so poor that trial and error turns out to be a good strategy, provided you can do it quickly and cheaply. There’s a fascinating literature on ‘design of experiments’
which is all about designing ef cient experiments. One interesting technique is Evolutionary Operation (EVOP), which involves making small changes to input parameters of a live process to see what effect it has on the output. Provided those changes are small enough the customer receiving the output won’t mind, but the tiny changes can be enough to guide continuous optimization.
Other fact- nding and research techniques can be useful, and even just thinking more is an important option.
Sometimes in a project you have a choice about when you do tasks whose outcome is very uncertain but important to the overall outcome of the project. Unless there are special circumstances do them as early as you can.
Get more feedback, faster:
• Include performance measures that give fast
feedback. For example, if you are trying to improve educational standards in a school then exam results are an important measure but cannot be used alone because they are only available once a year, which is far too infrequent. We really need to know next week if something seems to be working.
Adapt often and in a quick but controlled way:
• We’re used to
discussions about objectives, priorities, resources, and plans being tough and
often political. They are something we would perhaps prefer to do no more than annually. There’s no room for that kind of discussion if you are reviewing everything monthly. If the monthly reviews lead to violent uctuations in approach as warring factions struggle for the upper hand then adaptation will not work. Fortunately, if reviews are more frequent they are naturally easier and quicker. People get used to the routine. (You rarely get used to an annual review process, particularly as they are often reinvented.) People know the issues.
They’ve discussed many of the alternative actions before. The more frequent the reviews the easier they are and the smaller the adjustments.
Build exibility:
• Learning and thinking about what you have learned give no advantage if there is nothing you can do differently as a result. These options might be devised after the learning takes place but it is helpful to have given yourself exibility beforehand. Here are some types of exibility to aim for:
Flexibility as to extent:
Scalability: Look for ways to make it possible to increase or decrease
{
the investment, to any extent required, and at low cost.
Incremental delivery: Look for ways to deliver in small increments, with
{
the opportunity to assess the situation after each. (See EVOLUTIONARY PROJECT MANAGEMENT.)
Flexible timing: Look for exibility on when you do things, including
{
Commonality and multifunctionality: Do things that will be useful in
{
all or many anticipated futures. This may be because the action has several helpful effects.
Recon gurability: If the investment or product cannot be made
{
multifunctional, can it be made con gurable? This might take the form of last minute customization.
Reusable components: If the investment or product cannot be made
{
multifunctional or recon gurable, can it be made so that it is possible to reuse parts of it? Make it modular, re-manufacturable, or recyclable.
Gaining information and exibility often involve extra costs. There’s a ne line between intelligent exibility and being weighed down by dabbling in fringe activities, and that line tends to move with expectations of the economy. In good times people are happy to expand and try ideas, encouraged by optimistic expectations of the future. In bad times the new management cuts away what is now described as ‘non-core activities’.
As mentioned earlier, the usual human tendency is to see the future too narrowly. In good times, when our expectations are high, we are too con dent that our investments will be successful and tend to make too many of them. In bad times, when our expectations are low, we are too con dent that investments will
fail and tend to make too few of them. In both cases, we tend to make too little effort to maximize the learning and exibility in our plans.
Most of the time the right balance is best struck by judgement, with the hard thinking going into nding ef cient ways to build exibility and learning into our plans. Occasionally a big decision has to be made that justi es quantitative methods.