The Red Pill Executive. Tony Gruebl
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a well-kept fishing boat with a good-sized outboard motor and an aging 30-foot beast with two high-performance Chevy 350s. Jeff did not make the sensible choice. Dying to get his new boat in the water and satisfied that he had worked on it enough to make it sea worthy, he decided to go on a shake-down run.
In the protected creeks, that windy October day wasn’t alarming in any way. But after leaving the sanctuary of the smaller creeks, he found that the bay was whipped into frothy three-foot chop. Jeff had been out in the bay a lot, but never in these conditions. He wouldn’t have tried it in most boats that he’d been in, but this was a beast. His beast.
Without the proper level of risk mitigation or what we call spectrum analysis, he let’er rip and buried both throttles. That’s when it happened. It was almost like a religious experience, an epiphany. At approximately 70 mph, the three-foot chop all but disappeared. The beast ignored them and plowed along like they didn’t matter at all.
But then he noticed something else. Huge swells of water formed right in front his eyes. A lifetime of being on the bay, as well as many of the taverns around it, and no one told him these swells even existed. He watched them move and saw a way to mitigate risk.
Where they collided, the water surface lifted and became a mound he had to avoid. Where they parted, they left a giant hole, also best avoided. No one wants to drive into a hole at 70 mph.
So, there he was, witnessing a dance of swells that he had probably seen before but never knew existed. With this newfound perspective, he piloted the beast around the waist of the mounds, avoiding the holes, until he was satisfied that the beast was performing well and headed home.
It was a truly remarkable experience. The big takeaway: with the right change in perspective, you can see patterns that were just out of sight. Jeff didn’t witness a new reality. Those swells had always been there. He was just lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time, so he could finally recognize them.
The problem with project failure rates has been around for a long time. People have tried to fix them for a long time, too. When we look around now, we see that almost everyone is focusing on the three-foot chop, thinking that if they eliminate those, they’ll be able to manage their operations better. The truth is below the chop. It’s those giant swells colliding and parting to change the project environment until continuing on your original course could prove disastrous.
The best way to avoid the swells is to maintain Strategic Alignment.
Choosing the Red Pill
Over the past few years, the entire project management industry has been struggling to figure out how to operationalize Strategic Alignment at the project level. Blue pill executives play their cards close to the chest, and blue pill project managers are not comfortable pushing boundaries. That disconnect in communication runs deep.
Enterprise PMOs are PMI’s latest push toward Strategic Alignment, and this may be their greatest contribution to the space. Known in the industry as EPMOs, this task force monitors several teams at once, watching the overall impact of their projects on the company. Because they include top cover, EPMOs create a safe space, so it’s easier to identify the swells beneath the surface and maneuver successfully around them.
“There’s a difference between knowing the path and walking the path.”105
~Morpheus in The Matrix.
Even agile methodology makes an attempt at forcing Strategic Alignment by handing ownership of the project to the Operations Executive. The executive already knows the Business Value potential and can act accordingly. That may be one way to do it, but piling extra duties on people who have no time or focus for them only creates other problems.
Strategic Alignment requires fidelity in the true value potential. This level of reality feels risky. Such a commitment to truth is very similar to choosing the red pill.
As Morpheus told Neo in The Matrix:
You take the blue pill, the story ends and you wake up in your bed and you believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes. Remember, all I’m offering is the truth, nothing more.53
The Red Pill Operations Executive takes the risk and embraces transparency and clarity. This is where unvarnished reality is expected, discussion is open, and tough questions are welcome, even invited. Questions such as:
•If this venture actually costs twice the budget, is it still worth doing?
•How about if it takes twice as long or runs out an extra quarter?
•What if your corporate strategy changes and the goals of this initiative need to be realigned?
•What kind of reporting do you need to make sure you can properly communicate how this project stays in Strategic Alignment?
•Where is additional value that we can capture in and around this project?
•What are we overlooking?
When you have the cojones to work with team members at this level, you step out of the shadows and stand in the glaring spotlight. You also increase your personal capital and ramp up your chances to win.
Like we said, this is where stuff gets real.
You in?
Chapter 2 Summary
•As an operating model, the Iron Triangle must be demoted to a useful-tool status, replaced by Business Value with fidelity in the ability to see the true value potential.
•Saving major expenditures in time and money means a win for the organization. Quickly killing a wasteful project is also a success.
•Strategic Alignment is the best indicator of a project’s ability to capture Business Value.
•A completed endeavor that fails to achieve Business Value isn’t truly successful.
•Identifying real Business Value is sometimes complicated and murky, often intertwined with unsaid goals. Business Value becomes clear only by taking deliberate steps.
•Strategic Alignment is not the same as executive alignment.
•The Abilene Paradox, overly political behaviors, and other factors can skew perceptions of Strategic Alignment.
•Attempts to remove the human element from projects have fared no better than over-reliance on the Iron Triangle.
•According to Gartner, by 2021 enterprises that focus on executing Strategic Alignment will be 80 percent more likely to be industry leaders.
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