The Science behind Project Failures
March 1st, 2006 by HalToo many projects are late or over budget, or both. In the March 2006 issue of Customer Relationship Management magazine Jim Dickie reports in It May Cost More Than You Think that about 33% of all CRM implementations take at least twice as long as the CRM vendors told their clients.1 In addition, 41% reported that they exceeded their budgets for implementation. This is no surprise to anyone following CRM implementations. Far too many have been dismal failures. So how can this be?
In the same March issue, Natalie Petouhoff, Ph.D., attributes CRM failures to our brains, The Scientific Reason for CRM Failure. Dr. Petouhoff claims that resistance to change is a function of the amygdala's interpreting change as threatening:
"(The amygdala) kicks in hormones that tell the body "You are in danger," resulting in involuntary reactions of freeze, fight, or flight."
She claims this leads directly to missed milestones, scope creep, etc.
The article is just one full-page including a graphic. That's too short in my opinion to argue the case well. However, I've seen other authors make similar claims. Robert Mauer, author of One Small Step Can Change Your Life: The kaizen Way, describes an approach of making small changes to fool the brain. By making small changes the brain doesn't interpret the change as threatening, therefore no resistance.
Dr. Petouhoff recommends organizations employ a change management program (CMP) to counteract the predictable organizational resistance. Unfortunately, she uses CMP as jargon, failing to say what kind of intervention could succeed.
When in doubt, one small change after another. You just might fool the amygdala.
- Based on CRM's 12th annual Sales Effectiveness Survey with responses from over 775 companies. [ ⇑ back ]
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March 2nd, 2006 at 12:43 pm
Hi! I found you through Innovation Tools. Over on my blog, IdeaFlow, we are talking about mistakes and failure and their impact on innovation. Someone has brought up Nummi and continuous improvement, and I had started researching kaizen to see what it might say that would address the issue of risk, failure, and learning from mistakes. Do you hav any resources you could suggest — old blog posts of yours, outside resources, etc.? Thanks!
September 26th, 2006 at 9:07 pm
[…] Wondering why your project is late? Hal Macomber has been reading some work that indicates it may be related to an inherent brain function to the response of change. Read more in The Science behind Project Failures. […]
February 21st, 2007 at 9:42 pm
It’s an interesting point. I had a look for some time for materials on how to turn around failing projects, but I couldn’t see much. It appears that there are very few research materials on the web for the project management topic - a good opportunity perhaps?