Foreword

Pick a project you are currently working on. Answer this: Is it in a good mood or a bad mood? Now ask yourself: What kind of a mood am I in right now?

Notice that the answers popped up instantaneously. That’s because they came from your right brain. If it were in charge, your left brain would have appointed a committee and embarked on an extensive fact-finding mission followed by a detailed analysis. If logic, linear thinking, and deterministic approaches are the domain of the left brain, then emotion and intuition are the province and providence of the right brain.

A project that spends its life in a bad mood because the team, customers, and other stakeholders are unhappy is a project in trouble—one that is running on empty when it comes to motivation, innovation, trust, and confidence. These emotion-driven qualities are rooted in our right brain and serve as the lifeblood for succeeding on what Mike Aucoin refers to as “contemporary projects.”

Today’s Projects

Contemporary projects are aggressive. They feature speed, complexity, and ambiguity. For these volatile ventures, not only does the desired result evolve as you go along, but the path to get there is often circuitous if not unknown. Think of a heat-seeking missile in pursuit of a fast-moving target.

Prior to the widespread adoption of agile project management practices in recent years, the field of project management was dominated by approaches that were heavily rooted in left-brain thinking. These conventional approaches put the emphasis on the use of tools, rules, templates, and procedures rather than on people and interactions. Moreover, they tend to insist on following the plan (aka staying the course) rather than responding to change.

Unfortunately, well-intended conventional approaches have often been applied inappropriately. The result has been methodologies that try to torture contemporary projects into submission while stifling innovation and making project managers and their teams slaves to rules and tools.

Dancing at the Edge of Chaos

Mike Aucoin gives us a wealth of essential practices and techniques that allow our right brain to kick in. This book is a veritable toolkit for unleashing the vast and creative resources of this underutilized, and perhaps even underrespected, part of our head. Inside his toolkit you will find a set of seven principles, along with supporting practices, that enable project leaders and teams to thrive on complexity and ambiguity while keeping these jazz-like performances in control.

Although adamant about the benefits of right-brain project management, Mike recognizes the value of conventional project management approaches. That is, most aggressive projects are a blend of the known and the unknown, although heavily weighted toward the latter. To make sense out of today’s volatile ventures, the successful project manager must become a whole-brain project manager, one who judiciously enlists resources from both the right and the left sides. This is precisely what it takes to achieve mastery over the paradoxical nature of today’s projects, where opposites find themselves dancing in partnership: structure dances with freedom, the head dances with the heart, and reason dances with intuition.

Maturing in Project Management

My own experience tells me that many of today’s managers of contemporary projects lead lives that vacillate between frantic and quiet desperation. Following Mike’s advice will help you become even more than an excellent project manager. You will become a whole person, one who is able to master the most important and often the most neglected project of all: your own self-growth. This can mean the difference between a life of self-mastery and a life of self-misery. Using Jane Loevinger’s nine stages of ego development, Mike notes that the maturing project manager progresses from impulsive behavior to becoming an autonomous and integrated person who can tolerate ambiguity, foster emotional interdependence, and transcend conflict.

Nearly 300,000 project managers have earned their PMP® (Project Management Professional) designation, the certification bestowed by the Project Management Institute. For a growing number of PMPs, along with the coveted acronym comes the realization that projects mean people. And for those who are making the transition to applying both left- and right-brain approaches, this book provides the vehicle.

Partnering with Yourself

If the corpus collosum is the link that connects the resources of the left and the right brains, then this book is the missing handshake that joins both sides in partnership to deliver projects that bring value to the customer and also leave a legacy.

Mike’s work is not only a harbinger of where project management is rapidly heading, but it is a keen exposé of the often forgotten side of project management: people. In the words of Jim Lewis, author of numerous project management books, “Projects are people.” This book gives us the mood music and the dance steps.

This is both a revelatory and a revolutionary book. It is destined to become for project management what Viktor Frankl’s book, Man’s Search for Meaning, has become for modern psychology and self-fulfillment, Margaret Wheatley’s book, Leadership and the New Science, has meant for leading today’s organizations, and Stephen Covey’s book, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, has meant for personal and spiritual development.

Doug DeCarlo

Doug DeCarlo is the author of eXtreme Project Management: Using Leadership, Principles and Tools to Deliver Value in the Face of Volatility (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2004).

REFERENCES

Stephen R. Covey, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People (New York: Simon ＆ Schuster, 1989).

Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning (New York: Touchstone, 1984).

Jane Loevinger, Ego Development (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1976).

Margaret J. Wheatley, Leadership and the New Science (San Francisco: Barrett-Koehler, 1992).