Cognitive Dissonance

I recently read the book Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me) . The authors relate the problems of cognitive dissonance. In particular, how in the face of clear evidence, we often deny that we made a mistake.

They discuss clinic psychology and repressed memory. They discuss police interrogation techniques and false prosecutions. They discuss how cognitive dissonance and self-justification can led from small problems in marriages to divorce, or from small acts of dishonesty to major crimes and fraud.

I suggest that project managers when faced with concrete evidence that project managers' cost and time estimates are wrong will find ways to protect their egos by self-justification. They will find reasons why this evidence does not apply to them. They will explain how their project will be different.

Furthermore, the authors provide evidence that people with the highest self-esteem will be the most likely to deny the evidence. These experts' estimates will not be any better but they will have much more confidence in their estimates.  They will hold more strongly to their original estimates in the face to evidence proving they are wrong.

The authors describe the training of police investigators who are trained using a manual on interrogation techniques that will help obtain a confession from the suspect. The manual provides suggestions on how to determine if a suspect is lying. However, in controlled experiments, those police investigators, who were trained with this manual, did no better than untrained university students at determining if a suspect was lying. The trained investigators were however much more confident that they had correctly distinguished the liars from those who were telling the truth.

This makes me wonder if the courses taught by the Project Management Institute using their Book of Knowledge do something similar. They give project managers more confidence in their estimates but not more accurate estimates.

Deception and Intelligence

I recently read a book called The Folly of Fools: The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life . Robert Trivers writes about how and why animals and humans try to deceive each other.

Trivers opens the book with a discussion of animal behaviour. In particular, he mentions the cuckoo. Cuckoos lay their eggs in other birds' nests and thereby get out of the effort of roosting and feeding the newborns.

Some of these birds have learned to count their eggs. If they find that there are more eggs in their nest than they laid, they abandon the nest and go somewhere else.

So to counter this the cuckoos have learned that when they lay an egg in some other bird's nest, they should push one of the existing eggs out of the nest.  Then the count is the same.

To counter this, the other birds have learned to look for broken eggs on the ground below their nests.

In this way, both the cuckoo and the other birds are constantly learning different strategies to deceive and counter the deception.

Trivers suggests that this deception and counter-deception is how intelligence has been formed over time.  Also it happens much faster than evolution would suggest.

We have seen in earlier posts that project managers tend to have an optimism-bias.  They believe their projects will come in on time and on budget.

They may be attempting to deceive the senior decision makers. According to Trivers, the decision makers should be learning from this deception and trying to counter it. 

I have not seen this type of learning taking place.  Senior decision makers do not appear to be attempting to counter project managers' optimism bias.

The only person who I have seen who appears to be recommending that this deception should be countered is Bent Flyvberg.

I recommend Flyvberg's article “Over Budget, Over Time, Over and Over Again” found here and his books Megaprojects and Risk and Decision-Making On Mega-Projects in which he suggests methods to counter project managers' optimism bias.