As change leaders and project managers we only tend to see as risks the problems that we have seen before and solved in the past.
In Sionic Partner Chris Cooke's earlier days as a project and programme manager, he believed that as PM he was responsible for and owned the plan, therefore he should be its sole author. After all, Chris was the expert with the knowledge and experience to succeed. This belief did not always serve him well...particularly when coupled with inappropriate self-belief and optimism bias...
In this episode Chris shares a few of the more spectacular project failures this mindset led to. (It goes without saying that these all predate his time with Sionic).
The overall lesson learned and shared is that change planning is a design activity, and like all design, is best done with divergent conversation up front to identify and assess critical risks and alternative approaches - so that validation and mitigation is built into one's convergent thinking and strategy for change.
The specific enquiries Chris suggests are:
1. How to avoid 'big bang' implementations?
2. How to deliver value early and incrementally (applying the principle of 6x6)?
3. What are the most critical assumptions and what experiments could validate them?
4. What are the adaptive challenges to remediate?
Forewarned is, as they say, forearmed - prior knowledge of possible dangers or problems gives one a tactical advantage.
