Project Management, Sand Piles and Space Shuttles

I am about a third of the way through a fascinating book called The Age of the Unthinkable, by Joshua Cooper Ramo. The thesis of the book is that people looking for straightforward, linear ways to define and solve problems are not going to find them in an increasingly complex world.

While an A + B = C approach may have worked in the past, it is no longer effective. Things have become an order of magnitude more complicated in recent years and we need a new, creative mind-set to adapt and survive. This mindset must be radical, revolutionary and ready to toss out any assumptions.

This mindset is also ideally suited to manage large scale web projects, or any other type for that matter.

To illustrate his point, Ramo brings up the sand pile experiment of Danish biologist and physicist Per Bak.

“The problem that fascinated Bak also appeared, on the surface, simple enough: if you piled sand, grain by grain, until it made a cone about the size of your fist, how would you know when that tiny pyramid would have a little avalanche? After all, as the pile got taller, and the sides became steeper, it was inevitable that some sand would slide off. Could you predict when? Could you predict how much? Simple question, terribly hard to answer.”

Each grain of sand of connected to every other grain of sand in some way. Dozens of them could slide into an avalanche without affecting the majority, or one grain could affect them all.

I also happen to be reading Malcolm Gladwell’s What the Dog Saw and he weighs in on this idea as well. (Not the first time on this site Mr. Gladwell’s ideas have overlapped for me.) Gladwell suggests that large events – good or bad – are not usually caused by one action, but a series of actions.

What the Dog Saw is a collection of Gladwell’s writing for the New Yorker. One piece, Blow Up talks about the 1986 space shuttle Challenger disaster. Essentially, a faulty seal leaked flames which ignited fuel. What he goes on to contend is that the disaster was the culmination of a series of oversights, poor information and missed opportunities. There was no one simple answer, but instead a lot of little things that culminated in disaster.

At least initially, this seems to be what happened with the current oil spill in the Gulf.

In other words, Bak’s sand pile experiment. Countless moving parts that all have some effect on each other.

What both authors work to point out is that large problems do not have simple answers and that they will never really be solved. Not in a neat and tidy sense, anyway. Professionally, I can easily liken this to a web project because they never really seem to be done. Instead, successful sites are really more a “completed phase” than a “final product”.

What they suggest is that we come to terms with the possibility of failure and we focus our efforts on instead is risk management. From Gladwell:

“At some point in the future-for the most mundane of reasons, and with the very best of intentions-a NASA spacecraft will again go down in flames. We should at least admit this to ourselves now.”

Any project has a collection of variables and there is always a chance that the project will fail. Admitting the possibility of failure is liberating though since it often makes the job look less imposing. It is also a necessary exercise because it can help us to identify pitfalls. It can be done, as Ramo points out:

“Complex systems are not incomprehensible. If complexity were unmanageable and simply reduced to chaos in the end, we would have no Internet, no organized healthy ecosystems, no functioning immune systems or financial markets.”

Managing a project is managing a collection of ever-shifting risks and demands. The final product is often different than what was initially envisioned. But isn’t that just because something changed along the way? Something we never anticipated? Whether we discover a better method of solving the problem, have to stop “perfecting” one piece because we are simply out of time or funding or any other number of reasons, things change. Without becoming lazy in monitoring the mundane aspects of a project, we must continue to reassess priorities during the course of a project and remain flexible enough to adapt to new realities.

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1. Three Lessons from The Age of the Unthinkable by Joshua Cooper Ramo
2. What is the Content Management System?
3. Test as You Go
4. Why Does Your Website Exist?
5. A Great Web Site is Never Done