
Dunlin flock at Nelson Lagoon, Alaska. Flocks of birds, schools of fish, and swarms of insects, among many other biological groups, exhibit a behavior called swarming. Swarms seem to act in perfect if mysterious coordination. Swarms have no designated leader and no pre-defined global plan. Their behavior is emergent — a group improvisation. As humans, we like to believe that when we act in concert, we usually follow a leader or a plan. My own guess is that much of our group behavior is more like swarming than not.
Recent research is beginning to explain how flocks coordinate their behavior. See Biro, et. al., "Hierarchical group dynamics in pigeon flocks", Nature 464, 890-893 (8 April 2010), or listen to the story by National Public Radio, Backpacked Birds Reveal Who's The Boss". Photo courtesy U.S. Geological Survey.
When the time comes to depart from a carefully designed project plan, improvisation is often necessary. In Part I of this series, we explored some fundamentals of improvisation. In Part III, we'll explore the relationship between improvisation and risk management. We now turn to examining improvisation as a group process.
- Avoid the rush to improvisation
- Replanning takes time. And sometimes, replanning requires halting further work. If there isn't time to replan, and if work must continue, improvisation is a very tempting alternative, even though replanning is usually safer and cheaper than improvising.
- The rush to improvisation is often driven by group panic. Ask yourself, are you certain there's no time for replanning? That work really must continue? Sometimes, the rush to improvise is internally driven — we don't want to stop to think. That's a very risky reason for improvising.
- Remember that improvisation is a team effort
- At the point when a decision maker concludes that it's time to improvise, the rest of the team is still following the plan. Since whatever follows is a team effort, improvisation will be more successful if the team improvises together.
- When improvisation begins, all objectives, resource allocations, roles, and responsibilities are subject to change. A thorough group understanding of the new situation and the new approach is necessary for effective group improvisation.
- Devise your improvisation compatibly
- Operational structures of groups vary widely, from hierarchies to heterarchies or clouds. Hierarchical structures are top-down, command-and-control oriented, while cloud structures produce coordinated efforts in a more emergent fashion. An effective improvisational approach uses a style that is compatible with the operational structure already in place.
- For instance, a team that uses a hierarchical operational structure is unlikely to produce a successful improvisational approach if asked to do so using a cloudlike structure. And a team accustomed to an autonomous approach to normal operations will have great difficulty when an improvised alternative is imposed on them by fiat. Choose an approach to developing the improvisation that is compatible with the team's culture. If you must deviate, enroll the team in the deviation first.
- Use sophisticated communications
- Project inception Remember that
improvisation
is a team effortusually includes extensive group communication to propagate the vision of the project, its importance to the organization, and the roles of all involved. When improvising begins, the resulting project configuration can conflict with much of whatever was communicated at project inception. - Those conflicts must be clearly communicated. We must communicate the new configuration, the new roles, and the new responsibilities, and in so doing, erase the no-longer-relevant elements of the old project plan. Because coordination is essential to effective improvisation, the need for communication within the team escalates dramatically when improvisation begins. That's one reason why improvisation is so much more difficult for virtual teams.
In two weeks, we'll examine how improvisation interacts with risk management. First issue in this series
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More articles on Project Management:
Some Causes of Scope Creep
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when we have that how-did-we-ever-get-here feeling — we're experiencing the downside of scope
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Down in the Weeds: II
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with this frustrating pattern so common in group discussions.
How We Waste Time: I
- Time is the one workplace resource that's evenly distributed. Everyone gets exactly the same share,
but some use it more wisely than others. Here's Part I of a little catalog of ways we waste time.
Some Perils of Reverse Scheduling
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See also Project Management and Project Management for more related articles.
Forthcoming issues of Point Lookout
Coming May 14: Working with the Overconfident
- A cognitive bias known as the Overconfidence Effect causes us to overestimate the reliability of our judgments. Decisions we make based on those judgments are therefore suspect. But there are steps we can take to make our confidence levels more realistic, and thus make our decisions more reliable. Available here and by RSS on May 14.
And on May 21: Mismanaging Project Managers
- Most organizations hold project managers accountable for project performance. But they don't grant those project managers control of needed resources. Nor do they hold project sponsors or other senior managers accountable for the consequences of their actions when they interfere with project work. Here's a catalog of behaviors worth looking at. Available here and by RSS on May 21.
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