Taming "Dynamic Complexity": An Interview with Paul Lombard

This week we continue our instructor interview series by chatting with Paul Lombard. Paul has always amazed me with his wide-ranging curiosity and ability to see the big picture.  I always learn something from a conversation with him.

Question: What are you reading these days?

Lombard: Glad you asked, because I’ve been reading Atul Gawande’s The Checklist Manifesto.  Even though this is a book about the use of checklists to standardize medical practice, I found it has great applicability to project management. A checklist creates an “area of order” that allows us to deal more competently with complexity.  I work with students in many good leading edge organizations and yet it still seems to me that everyone seems to be dealing haphazardly with increasing complexity.

Q: Define for us what you mean by complexity.

A: When I think of complexity, it seems to me there are two types:
First there’s detail complexity.  For example on assembly lines or in other situations where there are a lot of moving parts.  This is the kind of complexity that we’re used to.
Then there’s dynamic complexity.  Dynamic complexity means the kind of unpredictable things, changes or risks, that cause a breakdown in the predictable order.  Things like winter storms, economic downturn, a breakdown in the social order.  Dynamic complexity is the reason that we started the practice of project management.  But it still seems that many organizations have not got their arms around that.

Q: What’s the answer?  What do we need to do to better manage dynamic complexity?

A: Well, that’s what I found so fascinating about Gawande’s book.  Here’s a quote from the introduction:

    “We have accumulated tremendous know-how. We have put it in the hands of the most highly trained, highly skilled, and hardworking people in society. And with it they have accomplished extraordinary things. None the less that know-how is often unmanageable. Avoidable failures are common and persistent, not to mention demoralizing and frustrating across many fields … And the reason is increasingly evident: the volume and complexity of what we know has exceeded our ability to deliver its benefits correctly, safely or reliably. Knowledge has both saved us and burdened us.
    “That means we need a different strategy for overcoming failure, one that builds on experience and takes advantage of the knowledge people have but somehow also makes up for our inevitable human inadequacies. And there is such a strategy -- though it will seem almost ridiculous in its simplicity …
     “It is a checklist.”

Of course he’s writing about the Health Care field but it will be obvious to project managers how many parallels there are.  Organizations are familiar with scheduling, planning, risk and change management but are not always applying them

Q: Why not?

A: Leadership may not drive or support it, is the answer I hear most often.  But if the organization doesn’t commit to consistency –like the checklist approach for example---they will not be executing with excellence against a consistent practice. If we are not committed to a consistent practice, we dismiss the area of order and reapply new knowledge without keeping the base knowledge.

The checklist creates an area of order.  Then new actions (for example, agile practices) can be applied.  It’s like jazz; you can improvise but first you have to know the fundamentals.

I recently read a report from McKinsey about organizations’ ability to manage supply risk.  It pointed out that most companies are still young in risk management.  More mature companies use risk management as a competitive advantage.  It’s not just CYA but the use of business intelligence and risk management as a strategic advantage.  So just to piggyback on Bill Athayde’s blog post, if we create a consistent practice around risk, this gives project management an additional source of value to the company.  Bill did a great job of offering simple lists of questions in a similar format to the checklist, showing how even a major value-adding strategy can begin with the simplest tools. 

Q: What insights have you gleaned from your students on these topics recently?

A: In a class I taught in Panama, one innovation leader said that they are getting much better at making projects commercial in part because they are applying risk management at the invention and innovation stage.  This helps with commercializing the product.  Risk thinking becomes systemic in other words they “begin with the end in mind.”  When you think of the commercial possibilities and risks of the product at the front end of innovation, the hit rate of success in the marketplace improves.  Again they do this by having the simple set of questions that they ask about each project.

Editor's note: Please address your questions to Paul in the comment fields below and stay tuned for an interview with PM College instructor Ruth Elswick next week!