The High Impact PMO

When I wrote the book, “The High-Impact PMO”[1], in 2017, my true and hidden goal was to help PMOs prepare for “unusual unfolding” of their business environment.

My belief was that human history may be more a succession of big surprises than a long series of small evolutions. I also learned by experience that what really moves businesses, organizations and societies are the (strategic) projects they undertake. That PMOs should prepare to unforeseen events if they were to successfully support projects was an evidence to me.

One of the paragraphs concerned the Seneca Cliff[2], a phenomenon studied by Ugo Bardi or François Roddier, also called collapse, avalanche, disaster, failures, or all sorts of adverse effects.

About 2,000 years ago, the Roman philosopher Lucius Seneca wrote to his friend Licilius[3] noting that “growth is slow, but ruin is rapid”

Seneca was a good Stoic. He knew that we must always be prepared for the future, knowing full well that ruin can come upon us at any moment. This is true for individuals as well as for an entire society.

He wrote in his letter that “it would be some consolation for the feebleness of ourselves and our works if all things should perish as slowly as they come into being; but as it is, increases are of sluggish growth, but the way to ruin is rapid.”

The Covid-19 pandemic has very abruptly put billions of people in very difficult situations. This “Seneca Cliff” unfortunately seems to me nothing more than a wake-up call and the trigger of bigger “unusual unfoldings”. It is a call to anticipate a much bigger “Seneca Cliff” where financial, social, and political systems could very well be shaken in a way none of us can imagine today.

I remember another chapter of my book. It says how difficult, if not impossible, it is to forecast a future. Do not ever try to forecast this second “Seneca Cliff”. Any event of this kind is unpredictable. But conversely, prepare for its consequences. Here you are in the domain of certainty.

And this is where the Project Management community and the PMOs can have a huge value. This is still more true for those who evolve close to the strategic levels of their organization. They can have indeed a strong influence on the system behavior. They can explore and adjust the position of their organization between order and chaos.

A single recommendation? Study and learn what Nassim Taleb, the author of the wonderful “Incerto”[4], calls a barbell strategy: “A barbell strategy is to be as hyper-conservative and hyper-aggressive as you can be instead of being mildly aggressive or conservative: taking maximum exposure to the positive Black Swans while remaining paranoid about the negative ones.”

May I remind that “a Black Swan event is a highly unexpected event for certain observers, that carries large consequences and that is subjected to ex-post rationalization.” A pandemic is a Black Swan for some, a White Swan for others.

Stay safe, wear a mask and respect social distancing

Philippe

[Note: I beg your indulgence for the Globish language I am using in this article. Any copyediting from one of you, dear reader, will be highly appreciated.]

[1] Husser, Philippe, The High-Impact PMO, Amazon Publishing, 2017

[2] Bardi, Ugo, The Seneca Effect: Why Growth is Slow But Collapse is Rapid. Springer. 2017

[3] Seneca, Lucius Anneaus, Letters to Lucilius, n. 91

[4] Taleb, Nassim Nicholas, Incerto, Incerto: Fooled by Randomness, The Black Swan, The Bed of Procrustes, Antifragile, Skin in the Game, 2019

You can also read some of my most successful articles here:

• An Attitude Of Openness To What Happens
• Seven Recommendations for Project Managers Willing to Grow Their Career
• Order and absence of order

Thank You

What a wonderful feedback from the members of the PMO Global Alliance community! I love you all. Take care and stay safe, you and your loved ones during these volatile and uncertain times. Life is stronger than a virus. You form such an exciting and valuable community!

The PMO Global Alliance Community

PMO GLOBAL ALLIANCE is indeed a global community of professionals with a common interest in the PMO (Project Management Office) topic. Members are PMO leaders, PMO members, Executives, Consultants, Teachers, Students, Project Managers.

An Old Story

Why such an interest for Portfolio, Program, Project, or even Product Management Offices and Officers? Simply because PMOs are adding a tangible and recognized value to any organization prepared to set up, develop, and work with a top notch PMO.

I remember a sad story that happened to a PMO several years ago. A Senior Vice President once nicknamed in public “pousse-café” (in French) or “coffee runner” one of his PMOs. He used to consider a PMO as a mere meeting facilitator. A PMO was limited in his mind to making sure coffee and pastries were served on time at the beginning of each meeting. He even required that this PMO (who resigned shortly afterwards) had to leave a strategy management board meeting a few minutes before starting to animate the meeting on the grounds that the strategy was confidential.

A Great Opportunity

But a PMO is not a “paper tiger” nor a division on the side telling people what to do. On the contrary, a PMO is there to help project owners execute and deliver resources to the best of their ability. And everyone knows how challenging it is for the project management community to be successful in our complex world.

The PMO of the above story was right to leave a VP who did not want to consider his added value. Do not stay close to anyone acting like Procrustes.

An organization delivers successfully its mission through the combination of both operational excellence and project management excellence.

And a seasoned PMO brings valuable knowledge and experience in supporting the development of the right techniques (and they are numerous and complex) in project management, the right type of leadership, and the human dynamics required to make the project stakeholders work together in the best possible manner.

Back to the PMO Global Alliance

PMO GLOBAL Alliance mission is to support the professional development of its members through mutual support, networking, advanced research and an intensive exchange of experiences.

I have joined this community several years ago. And I can tell you that I find many extraordinary benefits in being part of this community:

• Learning about innovative practices for PMOs, broadening my knowledge and evolving in my career.
• Accessing and sharing successful experiences with PMO professionals worldwide.
• Expanding my network in a vast international community of PMO professionals as well as many CEOs, Strategic Initiative Sponsors and leaders, Portfolio Managers, just to cite a few.

Join Us

Do you want to learn how this PMO Global Alliance can transform your PMO? Join us. You will not be disappointed.

To you continued success

Philippe

The world is about to breach a critical threshold in the global geopolitical dislocation. And as with every breach of threshold in a complex system, this will generate a suite of nonlinear phenomena: developments that do not conform to the usual rules and the traditional projections, be they economic, monetary, financial, social or political.

LEAP 2020[1]

Imagine you are on a beach of fine, golden sand.

Take a shovel and a bucket. Build a castle by pouring wet sand regularly on what will become the chateau of Sleeping Beauty. The pile of sand becomes higher and higher. Now and then, the heap of sand slides in avalanches from the top. Isn’t it frustrating?

This experiment was built by Per Bak[2], Chao Tang, and Kurt Wisensefeld, a group of physicists at the Santa Fe Institute in the 1980’s. Per Bak was a twentieth century Danish theoretical physicist. He coauthored the 1987 academic paper that coined the term “self-organized criticality.” Their beach was a table in their laboratory where the experiment repeated your sand pile and its avalanches.

What’s interesting is that, when piling higher, sand piles achieve a rest angle and a rough stationary state. As the sand is poured ever more upon the sand pile, we see many small avalanches of sand occurring. From time to time, we see a large or very large slide occurring. The sand rest angle weaves around a critical value without ever stabilizing. Figure 1 describes this phenomenon.

Figure 1 – Sand piles produce avalanches around a critical slope and their size is inversely proportional to their frequency.^[3]

There is no typical size for sand pile avalanches.

If you try to estimate the weight of human beings, the more humans you will weigh, the better you will become in ability to estimate their mean weight.

Conversely, if you try to estimate the size of the sand piles avalanches, the more avalanches you will observe, the greater your chance to see an avalanche size bigger than any previous one.

Repeating the experiment long enough, you will see massive avalanches, although these may be rare in occurrence. This remains true whatever the grain of sand.

This is a power law[4]. Per Bak and his friends have shown that it was a law in 1/f. What does it mean? F is the frequency of the avalanches. The function is the size of the avalanches. The more frequent the avalanches, the smaller they are. And the less frequent they are, the bigger they are.

Big events can be triggered by the same tiny (and invisible or undetected) cause.

An example of self-organized criticality.

A sand pile organizes itself until it tunes itself to a critical state of its rest angle. Each small avalanche cascades other small avalanches, thus redistributing its energy information from one group of sand to the other.

Complexity originates from the tendency of large dynamical systems to organize themselves into a critical state, with avalanches or “punctuations” of all sizes.

Large systems do not need massive movers to move immensely.

Ecosystems tune their structure to a poised regime between order and chaos, between subcritical and supra-critical behavior, with power law avalanches. What we observe here can also apply to flooding of rivers, to many biological systems, to earthquakes, and, most importantly for you, and to all kinds of social organizations as well.

Organizations also are oscillating between order and chaos.

They permanently self-organize by importing energy and information while exporting to the outside the maximum possible production of entropy.

In his book The Thermodynamics of Evolution, François Roddier explains that[5]

the universe incessantly strives to maximize the speed with which energy dissipates. That this principle also applies to human evolution should therefore not surprise us.

In 1988, the American scientist Rod Swenson recognized the Law of Maximum Entropy Production (LMEP or MEP) that states

the world will select the path or assemblage of paths out of available paths that minimizes the potential or maximizes the entropy at the fastest rate given the constraints.

Finally, we know since Claude Shannon that entropy and information are equivalent (though with a different sign). Exporting entropy to the outside is done by importing information from the outside. An organization that closes on itself ends up “lukewarm” and cannot produce any work. Organizations open on their external environment import information on the evolution, the expectations, and the other players of this environment. By doing so, they generate the equivalent of avalanches that are reorganizations, small and large, frequent and infrequent.

This is a lesson for anyone working in the domain of Strategy and Project Management.

Sometimes as a Strategy Management Officer or a (Strategic) Portfolio and Project Manager, you will be part of “something” sparking the avalanche. Sometimes you will stay a spectator or a watchman awaiting the next “Big One.”

Remember though that even if a Big One is a sure event, no one can predict when it will happen.

Yet, getting on board of a Big One is often the opportunity of a lifetime. Do not miss such a chance to be engaged in something big.

Look at the example of bicycles. Bicycles were introduced in the late nineteenth century in Europe (around 1885). This has been a lifetime event. By the early twenty-first century, more than 1 billion bicycles have been produced worldwide. They now outnumber cars. However, only modest improvements have followed the first time humans used only two wheels in tandem as a means of transport.

Key Takeaway

Regardless of the situation, playing with the waves of the inevitable successive reorganizations (avalanches), and especially big ones, is a chance for the Strategy and Project Management Community willing to catch opportunities to favorably surf on these waves and learn to develop favorable impact.

To your continued success

Philippe

This article is an extract of my book The High-Impact PMO . You can also read some related articles here:

• PMO or TMO, 3 Key Differences
• Do Not Stick to the Iron Triangle in Project Management
• Seven Recommendations for Project Managers Willing to Grow Their Career
• Order and absence of order

[1] LEAP (Laboratoire Européen d’Anticipation Politique) 2020, GEAB49, November 2010.

[2] Bak, P., How Nature Works, The Science of Self-Organized Criticality

[3] https://source.wustl.edu/2015/06/functioning-brain-follows-famous-sand-pile-model/

[4] A power law is a functional relationship between two quantities, where a relative change in one quantity results in a proportional relative change in the other quantity, independent of the initial size of those quantities: one quantity varies as a power of another. Source: Wikipedia

[5] François Roddier, Thermodynamics of Evolution, An essay of thermo-bio-sociology, Parole Editions, 2012.