Elegant Solution or Cinder block
How often has a co-worker enthusiastically described their elegant solution to a problem that you considered and their enthusiasm was contagious, swaying your opinion and judgment to accept their proposition? You endorsed it and aligned resources and project plans around the single concept, then defined metrics and details to track the progress. Three weeks later, the same person stands in front of you, casting sideways glances and blushing, as they describe how, after initial trials, the solution requires the mental skills of the entire MIT graduating class.
This situation often arises. The solution developer creates a personal attachment and subsequent justification with their effort, however the acceptance is more often based upon emotional rather than logical analysis. We often believe information under these conditions because a messenger of elegance is intelligent. We then extend this supposition, believing that intelligence alone provides them with the innate ability to be unaffected by emotional entanglement or misguided attribution of salvation to a concept or in this case solution. This is often proven when you hear, “He’s a smart guy, he knows what he’s doing.” In fact, we all remain human, irrespective of intelligence, education or experience. An excellent example of this is seen in testimony given by Vannevar Bush.
Dr. Bush was the man who ran the Government side of the Manhattan Project for three years, and was the first presidential science adviser. He was intimately involved in nuclear development and the direction it was taking. During his testimony to the Senate Arms Committee in 1954, he stated that nobody should be concerned with nuclear weapons being deployed as missile warheads, citing that the size and weight of a such weapons precluded their being deployed in this manner. He supported his testimony by citing facts, knowledge and his experience. The result was that the USA shifted its fiscal allocations for military R&D. We know that this opinion was historically inaccurate.
What Dr. Bush and many others, both before and after him, failed to account for was how their opinions precluded their considering concepts that differed from their accepted theories. Psychologists identify this as shielded behavior, which leads to an inflexible or non-adaptive behavior, thinking that the future can only arrive in a single form. When anybody assembles an opinion and vocalizes it you should consider their basis; the ‘why’ behind the ‘what’.
How does this apply to professional life? Business rectifies problems through a series of decisions that are made subsequent to the ‘Start the project’ decision. Each of these individual decisions needs to balance and accumulate with others to arrive at the planned end-point of any project. Each decision, while having its foundation in emotion, is always supported with logic. The more valid sounding the logic the more it is perceived to accomplish the task. Schools and technical training aim to have managers define risk and put systems in place to mitigate the risk of any decision. Yet, when presented with The Elegant Plan that makes such logical sense, is easily understood, and makes the listener feel success is around the corner, managers will pursue it. Why? Because the managers all desire to accomplish their goals that will provide varying degrees of personal advancement. Elegance adds notice and status to the goal attainment, so it is grasped and pursued. Pursuing failed elegance costs time, money and most importantly professional credibility. The critical loss is failure to learn from our prior behavior.
Projects start daily, managed by professionals who have experience and seek personal and professional success. These same managers will listen to and apply that elegant or previously successful method to the new project, expecting results equal to their prior efforts. Some will discover that it works, and feel the sense of accomplishment while listening to the accolades of their superiors. Others will discover the cinder block and have the scramble to recover and return to the schedule. Industry data suggests that 60% of managers discover the cinder block and have project failure. Reviewing the post-completion metrics of any project allow the cause to be localized to a small series of incidents combining to stall or derail the project. Few of these analyses discover that the tipping points were but a few individual decisions all resting on the lack of situational assessment, a lack caused by not identifying the exclusionary, shielded behavior of those who brought the elegant solution wrapped around a cinder block.


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