Latest / Project Podcast / 3 project trends for 2023 with Eddie Obeng

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3 project trends for 2023 with Eddie Obeng · Project Podcast

0:14
Welcome to the OPM podcasts OPM is the chartered body for the
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project profession. My name is Emma divita and I'm
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the editor of project apm's quarterly journal and your host
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in the hot seat. Today, with me, is Eddie I bring
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visiting professor at the school of growth Innovation and
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Entrepreneurship at Henley business school, esteemed
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columnist for apm's project journal and a p.m. honorary
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fellow. He's also learning director at
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the virtual business school Pentacle, a Ted speaker and
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co-founder of cube. He's author of project
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management. Bible all change the project
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leaders secret handbook, a new edition of which is out this
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year, Eddie calls himself a sense maker, and a Daft world.
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So who better to give us their thoughts on the most important
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Trends in project management for 2023 and what you should be
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doing about them. So Eddie I'm hello, I'm
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delighted to have you here. Hello, I'm delighted to be here
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fantastic. I think it'd be useful for
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listeners. The free picks up maybe three
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Trends across the board that project managers should be
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thinking about. Three Trends.
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A, how about if we start with people?
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Because that's probably closest to everyone.
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Who's listening, almost everybody has found that their
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world. The world around them has, got
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more complex more difficult to recognize in terms of what's
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going on. The pace has gone up their
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ability to understand what the future will look like.
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As got a little bit more unclear.
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And for many of us, the connections we make to our
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friends, our family, the rest of the organization.
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In fact, our country He's has changed and I think most people
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have recognized a little bit of that.
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And so that's the background context.
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The way I've described in the past when I'm trying to do a
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shorthand, is I always talk about, you know, the pace of
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change having a race against the pace of learning.
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And when the pace of learning is winning, then you're in an
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environment where you can understand what's going on.
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You can see what's coming next because you can learn faster
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world's changing. But when the pace of change
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starts to win, then we move into what I call the new world, which
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is Together different and in Project terms, I use that to
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describe how projects are gone from being very clear and
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obvious and I always describe his paint-by-numbers follow a
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system to the challenge of projects being around.
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Not knowing what you're going to do or not, knowing how you're
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going to do it or not doing anything at all.
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But everything must be done yesterday.
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So people living in that world have both a logical pressure of
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trying to get stuff done. But they had this enormous
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emotional thing, hanging over them and post covid.
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Everything seems Is this sped up even further.
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So what's going on? So so all sorts of things.
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The first is projects will speed up because one change leads to
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another, that's the first law of change, adding change to change
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creates chaos as law. So, if you do those two things
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that you understand that, even when you try and slow down
3:00
projects, it gets more complex, but what do you seen from that
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is people are therefore looking more for The Human Side of
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project you would have noticed the trend Move from people,
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talking about, I things like agility alone or delivery alone
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or even benefits alone. Now, they talk about things
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like, how do we make sure people can cope with the change?
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So there's a lot of stuff around things like the Neuroscience of
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projects, how people emotionally manage things through, you would
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have spotted things like all this knee injury changing
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injury. How do you survive the politics
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and the change without getting caught up in it?
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You'd have heard things around that.
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You'd have noticed that. Especially because covid made
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people move apart, and become dispersed.
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And I'll come to this later. There is a challenge in terms of
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trying to run a project team who aren't all sitting around the
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same table. You can't actually get to where
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you all, you can do is stare at their foreheads about once a day
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via a teams and zoom. So so the human element is is
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quite crucial and the leaders. Also, I think will find it more
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difficult to get clarity from their stakeholders in terms of
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either Our decisions because of the uncertainty or in terms of
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performance. So, as a project leader project
4:18
manager also small lonely When it comes to the individual, what
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could we be doing better? Or how do we better manage the
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situation first thing is, you, you need to solve accept the
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fact that you are in a world which isn't easy to predict in
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detail, and if you accept that, then your life immediately gets
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easier. I call it being lost in the fog
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will come to this in a second, but the whole idea that you
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won't always know what or how. So suddenly, the ability to
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connect it, to learn to recognize patterns, becomes more
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Important. So that's the first thing for
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you to do that. You have to make space in your
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mind because what happens is everyone's running around so
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fast and we live on our devices and so we don't stop.
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So we don't reflect. If you don't reflect you can't
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learn if you don't reflect, you can't figure out patterns.
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If you don't understand patterns, you don't know who to
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connect to. So you have to make time to
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reflect, absolutely crucial. That's number one, during your
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reflection. Don't just look for today's
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patterns, but recognize that as Human being the something which
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is built into the back of your neck as software, which makes it
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hard for you to deal with complex on certain changes.
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It's basically you have this software in that part of your
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brain, which checks to make sure everything is exactly the same
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as it was before and this is exactly the same, it says,
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relax, Is every every the same relaxed then it notices,
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something has changed and that software has the job to go.
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Oh my goodness. Something has changed close to
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us. It could be anything, it could
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be your role, your team, where it doesn't matter what the
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changes, or even a loud noise, it goes.
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Oh my goodness. I'm a human being.
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I'm now under threat. So it quickly does three things.
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First, most important thing is, it's, which is your logic off.
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And the reason for it switching, your log Georgia, golf is
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because it is trying to get you to react instinctively.
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It then fills you, full of lots of emotion, usually, fear to get
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you. Into the moment so you can't see
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the future and your brain is Switched Off and then it fills
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you full of adrenaline which is great if you were going to run
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away from something but since the whole world 24/7 seems to be
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chaotic, the adrenaline doesn't actually help you because
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there's nowhere to run to all the big challenges you read
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about in the news are huge. They look existential and they
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make an actor at the make you figure.
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You personally can do nothing. So you have this background
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flee, free-floating anxiety. When you talk about reflection
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is that something that you should be doing every day?
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Is it something you can build into so it becomes a habit.
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Do you do every day? Like it.
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So particular time of day when you stop and think, yes, yes.
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What you need to do is build it into your diary.
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So there's one rule, which is plan tomorrow to today.
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So so you plan the next day the day before because once the day
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starts it just takes you over, okay?
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And in the day you plant for tomorrow, you hide in there,
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what I call holes which are meeting He's with yourself
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lasting usually at least 15 minutes and if you can get a
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couple of those or four or five of those into the day, then
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you're in a good place, you plan a meeting yourself to a meeting
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and you set it with yourself as when nobody can steal your
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space. So how does reflection work?
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Reflection works on you thinking back on the experiences, what
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you plan to do, what worked, what didn't work, okay, and any
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big surprises you've had. So if you know my stuff, you'll
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know that there's a people engagement tool called Action
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Replay. We'll help you think about what
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you're going to do. But what you do is to looking
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for those things, which you plan to do, which work didn't work.
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And any big surprises which is another tool of mine called Land
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by sharing. So I can have a look at that on
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the internet and from there you then go.
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Well I plan to do this, it didn't work.
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What do I do? I do it differently how am I
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going to do it? Apply didn't plan to this.
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It worked anyway oh my goodness, how do I do more?
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So you're using that to try and get some sort of control over
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what you're doing, capture it, write it down and you're looking
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for patterns. Why is it every time I've had
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Stakeholders. They don't do this.
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How come people are doing? Because once you see the
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patterns, you don't have to chase after the events.
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So that's the people side. I'm going to do the other half
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of the people side, which is the stakeholder part.
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Yeah, teams and stakeholders, almost everything you do start
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from their point of view, not yours.
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Because it is not from your point of view that all you will
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do is trigger their crocodile brains and they will pretend
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they're responding to you, but they're acting emotionally.
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And then you have the sentence, you keep saying over Again is
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why didn't they do? I ask them to do and it's cause
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they didn't hear you because he frightens W surprise, that was
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something like that. So stop where they are start
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with what they're trying to do. So have you got any other tips
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around handling a team stakeholders for 2023.
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And so the stakeholder bid, the you can do what I'm suggesting
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which is engage with them. Humility.
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But some people are really struggling.
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So sometimes you just have to slip through the gaps I call it
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invisible lead. Leadership.
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So you have to find ways of avoiding the politics and the
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fear and the hassle but getting things done.
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I remember ages ago, one of my early projects.
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I when I was young project manager shell, I figured out
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there was a particularly Troublesome senior person and
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every time I did anything good and people ask me how it had
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gone. I'd attribute My Success to that
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person and that made it very difficult for him to be
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obnoxious about my project because it was a whole I know we
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hear you've been Helping Eddie. I mean, he probably can't pass
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that made a sarcastic remark but I said, oh, your line was really
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gave me some input. So this a line that we hate me
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lady happy, helping anyone that projects going really well.
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So so that's invisible leadership.
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It's Nicole an injury these days.
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But basically, what you're doing is you're trying to get through
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things and not let people get in your way but you're not doing it
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in a nasty way you're doing it by helping them by connecting.
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But basically painting Teflon all over yourself so you can get
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through all that. Complexity and challenge without
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without getting stuck in it, okay?
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At the second Trend you talked about was that kind of project
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challenge. So I guess you mean greater
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complexity what's going on in that area right now?
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Yeah, so so, so we've got better project management we've got
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better. All the all the decades I've
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worked in project management, we've got better and better and
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better at managing projects at the same time.
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The success rates haven't Gone up that dramatically.
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I'm not tells you that over that period of time.
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Something is changing well, first of all, we started getting
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much better at things like stakeholders and planning and we
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went realized that we were not everything with into a Gantt
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chart and we understood benefits.
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So we've learned all these things.
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I'm the whole professionalisation of project
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management has been learning how to run projects, but every time
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we did it, we then take on more complex projects or once we see
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it will speed, or we'd work on them in different countries or
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We work across cultures so that we had Indians trying to deal
11:14
with swedes, and with completely different cultural backgrounds,
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or we make people separate, or would use technology where you
11:21
couldn't see the progress of the project, because the program
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would say it's all going. Well, only a few bugs and you
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couldn't test and so on and so forth.
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Then we went into cultural projects and and the rest goes
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on. So we made what we tackles more
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complex And it has got more complex.
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It's the people you're going to be dealing with a probably not
11:39
in the same place at the moment. Many organizations are
11:43
experimenting with building diverse workforces, which sounds
11:48
like a great idea until you put it into practice and then you
11:52
discover that that brings its own set of headaches because if
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everyone is very similar, very little effort, has to go into
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letting making them communicate or even a line in their
12:02
thoughts. But if everyone's diverse, you
12:06
have to put tremendous effort in to make them communicate.
12:09
You got put tremendous effort in to make sure their egos.
12:11
Don't get rubbed up the wrong way, because they misunderstood
12:13
each other. You go, but huge amount of
12:16
effort into making sure they are lying, and they've understood
12:19
each other and especially the language of the different.
12:21
The people are different. Their values are different.
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Some of them were really care about the project, others won't.
12:26
So, so we've added that into the mix and it's not trivial at the
12:32
same time, we decided we were going to adopt after covid
12:37
Technologies, which promote primarily make us stressed.
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I'll explain why so sheep. And goats have the eyes on the
12:46
side, why? So they can see behind them.
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Why? Because they get eaten by other
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animals. Their prey animals, human
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beings, wolves Lions cats. They arise in front.
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Why? Because they eat other animals.
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Okay? So what we've done is we've
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given ourselves this Age where normally you don't look a
13:05
Predators because it's scary. And if you look at Predators, as
13:08
you just look at one, if you have 20 Predators, you know,
13:11
you're going to get eaten because and you look from one to
13:13
the other. But we've actually designed the
13:15
software where you have a grid of 20 or 12 Predators staring at
13:20
you for an hour at a time. And so everybody is crocodile
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brain, the old amygdalas firing all the time.
13:26
Your emotions are all over the place full of adrenaline.
13:29
And then the other headache, of course is, but half of us are
13:32
introverts. So we think in our heads and we
13:37
don't really necessarily want to see an image of ourselves on the
13:41
screen. So the mechanisms were using,
13:44
for all the introverts out there.
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My heart goes out to you because you end up staying at yourself
13:49
and it's horrible. So we're trying to manage all
13:52
these people in complex projects where we're not able to engage
13:56
with them because of the technology we work in bigger
13:58
groups. So it's harder sometimes to get
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to the truth because when you have multiple people Times, they
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don't want to confess to everything, and that's, that's
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the environment. And then we've got bigger more
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complex projects, and many organizations, have less money
14:11
to spend because of all the lock down costs and so on.
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So they don't want to get things wrong.
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So there's more pressure on the project to deliver and at the
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same time we may have moved to more agile ways of working.
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So we have to have more communication in through these
14:24
media, which may not be getting us the information which we
14:27
want. I hope I painted the picture and
14:30
people would recognize. So what do we do about that?
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If I Go in like three different directions that will probably be
14:36
useful. So the first one I'll link to
14:39
what I said about foggy projects.
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So when you are running a project which is full of
14:46
uncertainty, I call it being lost in the fog.
14:49
Things to remember, would you ever follow anyone through the
14:53
fog? You didn't trust now.
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Yeah, so so when you're on that level of complexity job, number
15:02
one for the project. Leader is to get people to trust
15:05
them especially in senior stakeholders, if they don't
15:07
trust you, what happens, they keep asking for updates or
15:10
clarification, they also updates.
15:13
Then instead of you doing your job, you're busy writing
15:15
updates. So it burns much more of your
15:18
time, put you under more stress for the senior people, the other
15:22
way thing you need to do to get them to trust.
15:24
You is to get them to realize that just because you haven't
15:27
reported anything, doesn't mean nothing is happening.
15:29
So, the difference in what you're expecting, what's
15:31
happening is called the anxiety Gap.
15:33
So when Cena people suffer from an anxiety Gap, they asked for
15:37
reports. So part of what you have to do
15:40
is to try to make sure that they never suffer from an anxiety
15:42
Gap. Even in a complex for key
15:43
project because otherwise it makes life more difficult for
15:47
you and you go slower. Let's talk about technology.
15:51
So technology. Temptation technology, it has
15:54
always been an illusion and it continues to be illusion.
15:57
I'm lucky because I'm old. So that means I have this thing
16:00
called perspective so I can remember all the way.
16:03
Back to when they told us things like no one work in the future,
16:07
will only have work one day a week and we'll have paperless
16:09
office is and all these new things called computers.
16:13
They're going to save us time and you won't have to look at
16:15
them for more than about five minutes a day.
16:17
So I can remember all the promises and I can tell you
16:19
consistently that software is software solved.
16:23
Real life problems, permanently, we would have no problems in our
16:26
lives because there's so much software out there.
16:29
So now park the software. The problem is primarily around.
16:33
Humans and living beings. That's where our challenge is
16:38
all come from. And as a general rule, Because
16:43
people don't do that future Dreaming or what I call Future
16:46
mapping. I'm going to put it out there
16:49
and get killed but I would say a good 75 percent of all the
16:52
problems. People talk about today problems
16:55
are actually the result of yesterday's Solutions.
16:58
So almost all of today's problems come from yesterday's
17:02
Solutions, because when the solution goes in, nobody bothers
17:06
to see what happens next. But the technology these days,
17:09
especially, because of the digital Revolution, it tempts Us
17:14
in different ways. So many of you people listening
17:17
might have played with AI with ideally chat, GPT and having fun
17:21
with that. So, so we know, we know these
17:24
Technologies are here and we've watched machine learning
17:29
Automation and we know I wrote an article a while ago about
17:37
what would happen if you had. A project leader, less project,
17:40
like a driverless car or Co less organization and it was a joke.
17:47
But I was, I was making the point.
17:49
That make a driverless car work. You only need six systems, you
17:52
know, lidar radar. Bob, they do different things.
17:55
Some that look wise on the close by, and some of my guide, the
17:58
wheels and so on, and as an analogy, if you take those six
18:02
systems and what they do, you can apply to a lot of what
18:04
leaders and CEOs do would we want to replace them know
18:08
because the emotional and human and empathy and the passion on
18:12
The energy and that, how do you deal with new surprises?
18:15
He's not built into that particular approach, but the
18:19
technology is very tempting and we really are afraid that AI is
18:23
going to fix everything for us. But I think, I think it's a,
18:28
from my point of view, the way I would approach using technology
18:31
is I have a slogan. My slogan is empowering and
18:36
Hounds people don't enslave and embrace them, like a python.
18:40
So, what you mean by that, what I mean by that is, Your project
18:43
leader. Okay, what do you want the
18:45
technology to do? Is to let you be in Australia
18:49
and America on the same day and power you to do that.
18:53
You want the technology the AI to trawl all your project plans
18:58
and tell you which people you need to have meetings with.
19:02
You don't want the AI to send out a letter on email to those
19:06
people to see whether up to the technology should Empower you
19:10
making super and should enhance your.
19:13
Our ability to be a human being. But the fashion is the exact
19:18
opposite, which is the technology is something you have
19:21
to type your data D2 data into. So basically, you are enslaved
19:24
to it. You have to keep putting
19:25
information into your Clarity, whatever it is or the AI is kept
19:28
busy. Busy trying to use up all the
19:31
big data, so you can see where the big trends are whatever it
19:33
is, but you become enslaved to feeding the machine and it
19:38
completely Embraces. You like a python, it squeezes
19:43
you. So for me, if I don't you ask
19:45
me. How to deal with the Temptation
19:47
Of Technology, you have to realize that the trick is figure
19:51
out what you have as your vision which is going to empower you
19:57
your team, your stakeholders, your organization or enhance how
20:02
people work, so that they have better, Human Relationships,
20:04
outcomes faster. And so on, when you figured that
20:07
out, then look at the Technologies available, don't do
20:10
the other way around. Don't just accept, all
20:13
Corporation believes that everybody should use blue.
20:15
Ah technology. No, no, no.
20:18
Be awkward say well okay great. But the technology is not the
20:21
solution. The reason we're doing this is
20:24
so we can work as a team and because 25 different countries.
20:27
So what do we need? We need to be able to see things
20:30
because we don't all speak the same first language.
20:33
So if we draw together, it's much more useful and so on so
20:36
forth. So again, if you think about the
20:39
technology started from what you need, not from, not from what
20:43
you're being offered. Eddie, you've left me inspired
20:48
invigorated. I'm ready to go.
20:50
Now, I think you've packed in so many practical tips for also
20:55
areas to really think about. So I just want to say thank you
20:57
so much for your time. And for your wisdom, what did
21:01
whether wisdom? But, thank you very much.
21:08
Thanks again to ready for joining us, and to you for
21:10
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