Mindfulness and Cognitive Biases in Project Management
This article will address how knowledge about, mindfulness, the workings of the mind, and the related cognitive biases that follows; can be used as tools to better deal with high-risk decisions in an inherently dynamic and complex world.
The focus will be in the area of “project, program, and portfolio management”, that for the ease of reading, only will be denoted as “project management” in the remainder of the article.
Before introducing the concepts of mindfulness and cognitive biases, a short introduction to complexity and the thinking behind “engineering systems” is necessary, as to explain their relevance and usefulness.
Contents |
Complexity
Even among scientists, there is no unique definition of Complexity[1]. Instead, real-world systems of what scientist believe to be complex, have been used to define complexity in a variety of different ways, according to the respective scientific fields. Here, a system-oriented perspective on complexity is adopted in accordance to the definition in [2], which list the properties of complexity to be:
- Containing multiple parts;
- Possessing a number of connections between the parts;
- Exhibiting dynamic interactions between the parts; and,
- The behaviour produced as a result of those interactions cannot be explained as the simple sum of the parts (emergent behaviour)
In other words, a system contains a number of parts that can be connected in different ways. The parts can vary in type as well as the connections between them can. The number and types of parts and the number and types of the connections between them, determines the complexity of the system. Furthermore, incorporating a dynamic understanding of systems, both the parts and their connections changes over time. The social intricacy of human behaviour are one of the more significant reasons for this change. We do not always behave rationally and predictably, as will be further examined below, which increases the complexity of every system where humans are involved.
Engineering systems
The view that our modern lives are governed by engineering systems, articulated by de Weck et al. [4], are adopted to explain why the complexity of the world only goes one way, upwards. In short, they distinguish between three levels of systems; artifact, complex, and engineering. See Figure 1 for a visual representation of the following example. At artifact level we have inventions, e.g. cars, phones, the light bulb, etc. In itself, they do not offer any real benefits to our lives. To utilize their potential, and to exploit their respective benefits, the right infrastructure has to be present. Continuing the above example, the needed infrastructure consists of; roads, public switched telephone network (PSTN), and the electrical power grid. This level of interconnectedness are defined as the complex system level. Continuing further; the once separated transportation, communication, and energy system, is now getting increasingly interconnected. This is the engineering systems level.
One of the characteristics of our modern society and the engineering systems governing it, is that technology and humans cannot any longer be separated. Engineering systems are per definition socio-technical systems, which as described in the section above, only adds to the complexity. Without the right tools to analyse and understand them, complex systems become complicated: They confuse us, and we cannot control what happens or understand why[5]. Mindfulness and knowledge about cognitive biases are some of those tools that can be adopted to project management to help decomplicate the complexity.
Mindfulness
Annotated Bibliography
- ↑ Johnson, N. F. (2007). Two's company, three is complexity: A simple guide to the science of all sciences, ch. 1, London, England: Oneworld Publications Ltd. - Annotation: Chapter 1 explains how complexity can be understood, and goes through some of its key components. Here, only the beginning of the chapter was used to explain that no absolute definition of complexity exists.
- ↑ Oehmen, J., Thuesen, C., Ruiz, P. P., Geraldi, J., (2015). Complexity Management for Projects, Programmes, and Portfolios: An Engineering Systems Perspective. PMI, White Paper. - Annotation: A review of the contemporary movements within the area of project, program, and portfolio management. Its definition of complexity, the section about mindfulness, and its mention of cognitive biases, was an essential first step in the shaping of the content of this article.
- ↑ (de Weck et al.,2011, p. 14)
- ↑ de Weck, O. L., Roos, D., & Magee, C. L. (2011). Engineering systems: Meeting human needs in a complex technological world, ch. 1 & 2. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. - Annotation: The first two chapters of the book is about how the human inventions begin to be connected, create networks and infrastructure, along with some of the complications on the way. It defines how we went from simple inventions, through complex systems, to engineering systems where everything is interconnected. This view was adopted here as a help to explain why the complexity of the world only is on the rise, and that new tools are required to deal with it.
- ↑ (Oehmen et al., 2015, p. 5)
