The SPIDER is about weaving a network of stakeholders that is effective to allow the project delivery.
Project Soft Power: the Spider role
Like the spider, the successful Project Leader patiently weaves its network, the cobweb. Like the spider, the general idea is to capture efficiently anything that comes close to the project and could influence its outcome – stakeholders in particular -, and manage them appropriately.
Having an effective, functional network is a primordial tool for the Project Leader. We are not speaking here of the social professional network that is recommended for career advancement and other mundane tasks. We are targeting a specific network that has to be setup specifically for the execution of the project.
Let’s face it: the most challenging projects (and the most rewarding, if they are successful) will have to deal with a lot of opposition, and the project leader’s job is to address this adequately to allow for the project to proceed.
Building and nurturing an effective project network includes identifying key stakeholders, engaging them, allowing 2-way communication, and nurturing the network on a continuous manner. The internal network inside the project team and on the project sites should not be forgotten. And disbanding the network at the end of the project needs to be considered with attention as people often remember the end more vividly.
The SPIDER role, weaving the Project Leader’s network, is an essential practice. It needs to be made effective by developing and nurturing a specifically targeted network related to the project. Going in the field or meeting stakeholders across hierarchy and roles is key to develop the most effective network. This activity requires proper planning and the successful Project Leader’s personal attention and time, so as to develop strong personal connections with the relevant persons.
My new book, ‘Project Soft Power’, will now be published very soon (the final production process has started). In this blog post as well as in 6 weekly sequels leading to the book’s publication, I will share with you what is Project Soft Power and why it is important to the world of the Fourth Revolution.
In the Collaborative Age, beyond the Fourth Revolution, organizations will be open and fluid. They will be organized around temporary projects. Yet, we don’t have today a consistent framework that allows a reliable project delivery, in particular when it comes to complex projects (those projects that involve many inter-related participants that all have different aims and interests). Although much progress has been done in the past decades to formalize specific tools around project management, the percentage of projects that fail outright or that does not deliver the expected value is staggering (depending on the sources, between 60 to 80% of projects). And research shows that it does not significantly improve through the careful use of processes described in thick manuals, and the increasing number of certified professionals in the use of these processes.
What is then the difference that makes project delivery a more reliable endeavour? I believe it is ‘Project Soft Power’, or the application of personal and inter-personal skills to project management. Project Soft Power is deeply rooted in emotional work, and is closely related to some of the key skills of the Collaborative Age K.E.E.N.
First of all, the “project manager” should not manage; she should lead. An unknown situation cannot be managed; we can only lead through it. Thus we have have decided from now on to use ‘Project Leader’ instead of ‘Project Manager’. In the Collaborative Age, the manager, a concept from the Industrial Age, will be obsolete anyway.
Project Soft Power characters
We have identified 5 main Project Soft Power skills that correspond to the following roles:
the SPIDER (weaving its network)
the KUNG FU MASTER (executing through focus and discipline)
the ENTREPRENEUR (able to invest upfront and defer instant gratification to reap later returns)
the TEAM COACH (building an effective team)
the PEOPLE CATALYST (unleashing the talents of the individuals)
In the next weeks I will publish on a weekly basis a description of each of these roles. Get ready for a mind-changing description of success factors in the Collaborative Age!
That form of crowdfunding is almost quite close to a a cooperative approach (investment upfront in exchange for cheaper products later), but it works and can serve to produce win-win solutions locally! What’s interesting is that people got involved into the project after they had been touched via social networks, as the bakery project did not have any storefront at the beginning.
So, social networks and crowdfunding can work at different scales, from the local to the regional to the global. How can we leverage these different scales?
Being now an independent entrepreneur I forget how many people still live in organizations that are still deep into the Industrial Age. Lately I was visiting an organization in the US and I was struck by the lifeless office.
Dull office corridor
Long, dull corridors. Light grey walls and dark grey carpets. People each in an individual office with standard furniture, padding away at their keyboard, eyes stuck on their screen. Silence. Few interactions save the weekly shared breakfast. Don’t know who my neighbour is.
Discussing about the next possible pay raise, about the pay grade, moaning about the work conditions and the boss. Moaning a lot.
Stuck in a box, doing the work from 8 to 5. Gone Friday at 1, exactly.
Bureaucracy as soon as I ask for something out of the ordinary (why on earth would you want two colors of post-its?).
I felt like I suddenly was in another world. I was so used to dynamic project open spaces with people moving around, discussing freely, interacting constantly!… Used to people working hard and passionately, where time flies!
Ouch! The worst is, the office I just described is normal to a majority of people. That’s normal to a large number of organizations. Actually it is the norm, anything different is looked at suspisciously.
Hey, there is another life out there! And as I was discussing with the senior management what to do to make the organization more dynamic, it was obvious: break the walls. Put in some color. Do everything you can to increase interaction. Get project teams to sit together instead of having its members sit in their respective departments at the other end of the building. Is that so complicated? No. Is that scary? Yes. That’s probably why I was served the argument of the budget as an apology not to change.
Release the potential of your people. Just create a conducive environment, and you’ll see the change. And above all, don’t be scared!
In this blog, we’ve argued that companies ought to adopt social media to release the creativity of their organization. That it is difficult (see for example “why organizations don’t implement virtual social networks“) but companies that will succeed in this transformation will reap fantastic results.
BASF success story in adopting social media
There start to be numerous stories of large companies being very successful at engaging their employees into internal social networks. Dion Hinchcliffe is writing a series of short case studies: see the case studies for BASF, Yum! brands, Alcatel-Lucent, Cemex. You’ll note it is not just companies at the cutting edge of IT technology but real brick-and-mortar companies. In each case, after due preparation, the engagement of employees has been noticeable. These companies are still to experience fully employee’s self-organization and initiative, but they are becoming close. How will they react when employees will take significant initiatives? Time will tell. For sure, they are well in advance compared to others and that should give them a significant competitive advantage.
And what’s the status in your company? Have you already setup and spread your internal social network? What are you waiting for?
Yourself or your organization needs a drastic change? How can you do that?
Too many change gurus and consultants will engineer and recommend large, complex programs. Yes of course, you need to re-engineer processes, communicate, engage with people.
My take: any change effort is 0.1% decision, 10-20% engineering, 80-90% implementation.
Don’t exhaust yourself at the engineering stage. Spend less time designing the perfect change program. Focus on the one thing that needs to change, and design a very simple incentive system to get yourself or your organization moving in the right direction. Remember the elephant and the rider. You want to be emotionally engaging, capitalize on the elephant’s hot buttons to get it moving, and easy.
Then, however, be extremely disciplined and consistent in applying the new, simple system. It is simple, easy to communicate. Repeat, repeat, repeat; communicate, communicate, communicate; act consistently, act consistently, act consistently.
Remember: don’t consume all your energy devising the change. Keep it simple, and emotionally engaging. Keep your energy for the implementation stage. And there, be ruthless in your discipline and how you apply it throughout the organization.
Education is a key institution that will necessarily be fundamentally changed by the Fourth Revolution. Traditional education was created during the Industrial Age to produce people for Manufacturing. Still, today, the education model is already changing, deeply and more quickly than we think. And voices start to be heard on that topic.
Students graduating from conventional education: an institution already obsolete?
Lately, high education had become a very profitable market and some countries like Australia openly develop Higher Education as a great activity sector that also serves to attract foreign currency and talents. Advertisements for Universities is at an all-time high in all South-East Asia countries! At the same time, the cost of education has soared, leaving many youngsters in deep education debt in countries like the USA.
How much is higher education a good investment? The model used to be that investing in a great university would be greatly profitable on the long term, over one’s career. That it would be the safest investment of all. It is not so straightforward today, of course. Some people like Peter Thiel announce that we are in a ‘higher education bubble‘ where education is overrated and its cost will collapse soon. In this article on “the education bubble has popped“, Doug French argues that the profitability of investing in (formal) education becomes more and more elusive as tuition soars and under-employment looms. He also gives some interesting numbers: tuition increasing four times quicker than inflation, more and more credit-based funding (education debt would have outgrown credit-card debt!).
Good education was supposed to lead to good jobs, at least at the beginning of a career. More and more authors argue that 1) “jobs” in the traditional meaning of “slots inside an organization that provide a steady income” are disappearing; 2) to find good income in one’s occupation, other skills are needed than those that are supposed to be learnt at school. Daniel Jelski in this post “the three laws of future employment” states that
Law #1: People will get jobs doing things that computers can’t do.
Law #2: A global market place will result in lower pay and fewer opportunities for many careers. (But also in cheaper and better products and a higher standard of living for American consumers.)
Law #3: Professional people will more likely be freelancers and less likely to have a steady job.
As a consequence his advice to students is quite different from what conventional education would advice: follow your passion, work your way into mastery (the 10,000 hours practice), and work on emotional connection and beauty.
The crisis in conventional education can be seen coming. If that is really a bubble, it will hit hard when it will burst. The Fourth Revolution is at work!
During a talk given on 6 March, 80 members of the Singapore project management community discovered my new concept of Project Soft Power™!
Project Soft Power and the Fourth Revolution
It is basically a cross over from the Fourth Revolution and Emotional Intelligence applied to Project Management. Do you recognize the slide at the back?
This talk sponsored by the Singapore Chapter of the Project Management Institute was very well received. And more over we all had fun through the exercises that were designed to have the participants discover more about themselves! See here the summary report on SPMI website. Click here to access the Project Soft Power slides on slideshare.
The Project Soft Power book is now in the last stages of production for a publication in May of this year. Or, you can also ask us for a keynote speech. In any case, stay tuned!
Project Soft Power presentation in action - having fun!
Any worthwhile project will encounter resistance. Because it tries to change the status-quo. Because if it is worthwhile, it changes its environment significantly.
Here are some contrarian thoughts about this effect:
your project does not encounter any resistance? Reevaluate if it is worthwhile!
your project does not go through hard and difficult times? Reevaluate if it is worthwhile!
Now obviously there needs to be a measure of resistance in the process. It must not be so hard as to be impossible to overcome. Still it must be hard enough so that not so many people do overcome it.
Reevaluate your current personal and professional projects. Are they difficult enough? Are they too difficult?
Most importantly, drop those that are too easy. They are probably not worthwhile.
Two Google-related university teachers have just done a mindblowing experiment that overturns conventional university education.
We know that the Fourth Revolution will overturn most institutions we’ve inherited from the Industrial Age. The latest to date: Universities.
It’s still only a precursor, still it gives us the direction for what will happen in the next 10-20 years: the first online course from Stanford University, a course on Artificial Intelligence, has been given late 2011. The mindblowing detail of this experiment that ended up being a revolution is given in this post by Eric Salmon, “Udacity and the future of online universities“. Unexpectedly, more than 160,000 students from all over the world registered and the professors had to setup a dedicated website!. Extracts from the post:
“There were more students in his course from Lithuania alone than there are students at Stanford altogether. There were students in Afghanistan, exfiltrating war zones to grab an hour of connectivity to finish the homework assignments. There were single mothers keeping the faith and staying with the course even as their families were being hit by tragedy. And when it finished, thousands of students around the world were educated and inspired. Some 248 of them, in total, got a perfect score: they never got a single question wrong, over the entire course of the class. All 248 took the course online; not one was enrolled at Stanford”
WOW. WOW! And it’s not finished:
“The physical class at Stanford, which dwindled from 200 students to 30 students because the online course was more intimate and better at teaching than the real-world course on which it was based”
Read the rest of this mindblowing post! And right now, these teachers have decided to create a new online university, Udacity, which will propose soon online courses on a number of subjects, IT-related mainly.
So, what is really new? For some years already, large universities have made their courses accessible on the internet (see for example, Stanford Engineering Everywhere or MIT opencourseware); by this we mean the course material.
An institution under siege: University; here, Stanford campus
However, the lectures have never been given online, nor have students be graded or have taken exams exactly like if they were in the class. Sure it just got tried – and it works!
As many Industrial Age institutions, the classical university institution is now under siege. Sure, there will be a few more years before we’ll see macroscopic effects: this experiment has been done by IT-savvy professors who also work at Google, for IT-savvy students; it will take time before this spreads to the entire faculty and all subject matters.
Still, the university institution is in question and will soon be exactly in the same conundrum like physical newspapers or the publishing industry are today. Their economic model will become unstable because it is funded by big Industrial Age corporations that seek to produce commoditized degree-holders (see the blog post on “Leave alone the academic executive programs. Go and learn real life leadership! It’s cheaper and better!“). The logic of geographical concentration of university to enhance communication is obsolete as we have just seen demonstrated. So, be ready to see big changes. And Google is at the forefront of the new online university (the two teachers of that particular course are also working at Google), so that we can expect that Google will see the interest of reinventing the business model, leveraging lower fees to a much larger number of students.
Should the current universities not reinvent themselves in time (which is probable in view of the fate of most institutions when comes a fundamental revolution), other players will replace them, and they will disappear in the heap of Industrial Age institutions that did not manage to transform themselves…
If you want more in-depth analysis, more comments on this revolution in Alex Tabarrok’s blog: The Coming Education Revolution (August 2011) and Udacity (January 2012).
Once in a while I see an interesting idea for entrepreneurs and I note it down – I sometimes lose its origin though. Here are some words of wisdom for the would-be entrepreneur. Funny enough they could also apply to all of us individually.
cash issues!
“Profit in a business is like gas in a car. You don’t want to run out of gas, but neither do you want to think that your road trip is a tour of gas stations” – Tim O’Reilly in a post about Steve Jobs, ‘A focus on things that matter most‘. In the same post there is an quote from Steve Jobs: “My passion has been to build an enduring company where people were motivated to make great products, the products, not the profits, were the motivation“. The lesson is that if you want to build a great companies, focus on the clients and the products first. Profit will come, as a consequence.
A useful piece of advice about cash flow management: Cash flow is like the depth of water below the keel of your ship. You don’t care if it’s more than what you need to move forward. It can be 100m or 2,000m and it makes no difference. But make sure you have enough to never run aground!
A fantastic concept from the last Jim Collins’s book, Great by Choice: Uncertainty, Chaos, and Luck–Why Some Thrive Despite Them All: “shoot bullets before you shoot cannonballs“, or in clearer terms, don’t commit large amounts of resources to a new project before you’ve tested it at small scale. The small scale experiments – the bullets – will give feedback and will allow to decide whether and where to shoot a cannonball that will commit lots of resources from the company. Do a lot of small scale experiments and shoot cannonballs rarely on those opportunities that are proven.
