Even a little more efficiency, a little more changes in the instructions, a little more participation and a desire to help, daily testing and active correction of problems before they caused any damage.
When I became a web project manager, I discovered that there is a way of interacting that takes me apart with all my set of soft and hard skills into inconsistent parts than Bastindu has a bucket of water from the kind girl Ellie. And that it is used actively, a lot and for any reason. That this method of action is so important for so many people that I was just lucky not to encounter them before - or that managers were covering me from them.
As a curious, inquisitive and idealistic person who actively uses the presumption of sanity, I began to try to explain this method of action from the perspective of the classical theory of management, starting with Drucker, but, of course, this mode of action did not fit into the concept of structured half-open organizations with certain goals.
From my dullness and inability to bring theory to practice, I was immediately depressed, and spent many years with the imposter complex, actively studying all the information available to my understanding from the social sciences: psychology, anthropology, sociology and history. Well, and biology, in the context of the behavior of social insects and animals.
And somehow it suddenly turned out that the phenomenon is biological and, apparently, due to a
Probably someone calls this method something else, and I call it "entropy management."
Case One, Historical
On August 10, 1628, the flagship of the Swedish fleet, the Vase galleon, sailed from Stockholm to Elvsnabben. The idea was that he would symbolize the military power of Sweden and surpass any enemy in his path with unrivaled firepower, gold jewelry and quality finishes. Everything is like in the Imperium, but only in real life.
Henrik Hubertsson de Groot, a Dutch ship, was involved in the construction. He worked long and hard, then he advised everyone at the shipyard to breed and multiply further without him and played in a box. After his death, the ship was completed by Hein Jacobson.
During the work, the king repeatedly intervened in the project, making changes, therefore, from the berth of Stockholm to the place of his inglorious death, the ship went exactly two kilometers and dragged to the bottom up to 400 people (estimates vary).
The ship wasn’t even helped by the fact that, contrary to the highest monarch’s will, the shipbuilders increased the hull width by 2.5 meters - it was still unstable and could not take on enough ballast to compensate for the weight and sail of the mast.
The trial was long, the guilty party was not found. The drawings were claimed by the king, the king cannot be judged, Henrik Hubertsson died, the rest really did everything that depended on them.
Three hundred and ninety years later, from the side, I watched the solemn retreat to the bottom of the project, implemented on the same principle: despite all the objective obstacles, the site had to symbolize and overcome, so even the customer made architectural decisions (not to mention purely cosmetic external details) .
The first conclusion: the phenomenon is not new, and the dependence on the real budget of the project is simple. The larger the budget, the greater the likelihood that the project will collapse immediately after the grand opening. With a small budget, there is a chance that the project will be bent before implementation.
Case Two, Monkey
Biologist Robert Sapolsky observed one colony of baboons for 33 years.
The baboons were ordinary - they continuously dominated until the death of the insubordinate alpha male, and in general, the level of stress in these social animals went through the roof. And also the alpha males ran to the territory of another flock and stole nishtyaks from the garbage dump there, until they became infected with tuberculosis and rested in a few days.
This feature of the rapid development of tuberculosis in baboons.
After that, life in the flock improved: fights almost stopped, subordinate males relaxed, even with sex it became easier, and the flock grew even without access to the garbage, and, according to the latest information available to me, it feels good.
The second conclusion: fundamentally, this is an overcomeable phenomenon that is not innate, but educated and so expensive that it does not reproduce by itself in peaceful conditions.
Case Three, Ant
Ants have a parasite comparable in size to it. Lomehuza.
It mimics the specific pheromones of an ant family, plants foragers and nannies for a drug, replaces pupae with its larvae, eats a colony from the inside.
The anthill, which has never survived the attack of the Lomehuza, is basically defenseless and dies in a limited time. Say for a year.
They say that if you save an ant family, destroying all degraded individuals and carrying it five kilometers away, the new ant hill will be invulnerable to Lomekhuzes and will kill them as it meets, carrying the exterminatus to the genokrad in the name of the Empress.
I did not check, I did not find reliable information about this either, but I want to believe in it.
Rumor has it that even in a normal anthill, the proportion of ants that mimic violent activity is much more than working, but this is not so important.
The third conclusion: even structures organized on a biological basis without free will are vulnerable to abuses that they cannot determine or which they cannot get rid of.
Complementary statements
- Man is an animal whose behavior is regulated by society to a much greater extent than biology. Therefore, he is able to take actions guaranteed to harm him, his descendants and relatives, if encouraged by society, that is, the meme has much more power over a person than a gene.
- Society can be effective in many ways. A society that actively improves the world around it loses to a society that actively implements the leader’s orders in a direct military clash, therefore the evolutionary ethics of the Baboon alpha male of a strong military leader and war, as the main way of development, has entrenched even in fairly peaceful communities.
- Outside of the religious picture of the world, a person does not have any personal meaning that can be recognized by society. Personal meaning - a thing quite sociophobic, expensive and leading to isolation, so people prefer public meaning.
- The intensive distribution of memes, characteristic of a certain period of earthly history, starting approximately from the second half of the seventeenth century, increased the value of communications so that it became socially beneficial to introduce a unified system of measures and weights, cadastral registration of land and surname-based citizens.
- Societies with high value and speed of development of communications have gained an advantage in response speed and the ability to concentrate efforts and resources on a tactically advantageous site.
- Communication channels have always been a reliable way to make a profit. Therefore, barons and robbers love roads, pirates like sea routes, customs officers like ports, and Denmark like the Zund Strait.
- Based on statements 4, 5, 6, at some point, the world needed a lot of people to provide communications. Moreover, based on points 2 and 3, they were selected in micro tribes with their loyalty system and their hierarchy. Therefore, up to a certain point, communication channels were unpredictably effective and duplicated many times.
- The subsequent development of states led to an increase in the number of communications and transactions, and required even more people who provide and support them. The fee for using these channels for a small part covers the costs of their maintenance and development, and for the most part provides rewards to people.
- Since the active development of telecommunication networks, the number of people serving communications and transactions has been growing even faster than before. And they are incorporated into existing structures and inherit existing ethics.
- And this applies not only to ministries and departments, but also to commercial structures, based on paragraph 4 and the general theory of the life cycle of Lomekhuz memes.
Method of action, description
And finally, you can describe the method of action that so killed me at the beginning of the career of a project manager, and from which I still have difficulty dodging my routine activities (and hardly covering my subordinates. More often with my chest, like Sailors).
Watch your hands carefully.
- Any project is built on supporting communications and transactions. They have a receiver and a transmitter at both ends.
- Communications and transactions are not free. They spend time, effort, money and quite material resources.
- The increase in costs and losses in the communication channel can bring profit to that of the parties whose representative has a stronger position.
- The most favorable position is for those who control communication, but are not responsible for the result. Therefore, many managers work as transfers.
- Often you can observe parity: the customer has a stronger position, because he pays money; the performer has a stronger position because he is more competent. If the customer does not have a queue of verified performers, and the performer has a queue of orders, the performer wins. Otherwise, the customer.
- You should always remember that this game is not started to obtain the result stated in the contract, but to receive socially approved bonuses and preferences by the initiators of the game.
- If both sides know how to play these games, then the result will be achieved. A world-famous designer’s studio and a cited blozhik will receive an hungry status as a reliable project executor; the customer will receive a project from a world-famous studio and a certain PR effect; managers from both ends will also receive their profit. And this is the result that is needed, but which is not talked about.
- If only the customer manager can play these games, then there will be a classic situation with an endless change in requirements until he is crushed in his hierarchy by the demand for a result. After that, anyone will come down.
- If only the executor’s manager can play these games, then the project will not be implemented, and money will not have to be returned.
- If both sides do not know how, but try to play these games, it turns out pretty ridiculous and stupid fuss, in which someone backs off when you need to push, and presses when you need to back off. Sometimes such projects even reach the final. Sometimes even the resulting product can perform almost all of the functions indicated. Sometimes it does not even require improvements. Once I saw this.
That is: the project is not initiated in order to achieve the goals that are declared in the project documentation. The project is initiated in order to extract from the communications and transactions the personal benefit of the project manager on the part of the customer (mainly the status and reputation of an expert, but often quite specific amounts). The resource for profit is limited by the project budget (monetary, temporary and reputational), the contractor claims to spend this resource on the project as part of the project documentation, therefore, the contractor is hostile to protoplasm and is aggressive, not allowing to confirm his status in the tribe to which the performer is not involved.
Necessary note: in this case, if the status and profit for the project manager of the customer are immediately tied to the final product (a percentage of the profit for the online store, for example), then the real goals of the project are much more likely to meet the stated in the project documentation.
This also happens if the project manager on the customer side does not play alpha games, but taking into account 3 additional statements, I would not recommend counting on it.
Output
Entropy management is aimed at extracting resources from transactions and communications in favor of the personal benefit of the head (controlling the channels). In business, this leads to threshold efficiency and extreme complexity of business processes, when everyone does something and the company somehow functions, but a large iron cap sneaks up with the inevitability of the jack. But the tops always have someone to dominate in between raids on someone else's trash. In projects, this leads to an endless refinement of the requirements, which looks like digging on the topic “you have not worked enough”, but it is not.
Since in order to grow to a top manager, you often need to be effective in entropy management, the ethics of an alpha baboon is quite strong among hired directors. Of course, there are exceptions, and quite often. But less than we would like.
Therefore, it is always necessary to lay down that the project manager from the opposite side will pursue goals that are far from those stated in the project documentation. And the only way I can defend myself against this that I see is to have a strong expert position, a competent team and good lawyers. And you can never apply the presumption of sanity, it can become very painful.
But, of course, you can always play these games, finding yourself a suitable justification.
Choose any of them or invent your own: “a person with a high visual culture,” “effective manager,” “real man,” “alpha male,” “cultural heir to the Empire.”
Maybe even win.
Like that ant, which more often than others keeps pace with the lomehuza for nectar.