left to my own devices – occasional thoughts on higher education

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A very small entry in the list of Dominic Cummins’ pratfalls was the resignation in early 2020 of an aide who had expressed some pretty abhorrent views, and Cummins’ characteristically gnomic response to questions on this topic where he advised people to read about ‘superforecasting’.

Cummins was referring to the book of that title by the University of Pennsylvania academic Philip Tetlock and journalist Dan Gardner.  In doing so he was unfairly associating the book and its authors with the views expressed by the aide. It also clouded the value of the work set out in the book; endorsement by Cummins was taken as reason enough by some to ignore the ideas of, and thinking behind, superforecasting.

And that was a second unfairness. Superforecasting was written for a general readership, rather than academic audience. Consequently it was all too easy to overlook that the book had a very solid social science research underpinning.  It said a lot of interesting and helpful things about the art and science of prediction, and it remains a book all leaders can learn from.

Well last year the co-author of Superforecasting Dan Gardner did something similar on project management, jointly authoring How Big Things Get Done with Bent Flvybjerg, at that point Professor of Major Project Management at Oxford’s Said Business School.  Also intended for a popular rather than an academic readership, How Big Things Get Done was again based on a wealth of serious academic research as well as, on this occasion, professional practice.  It’s an awful title for a book, but it’s by a distance the best thing I’ve read on project management.

uniqueness bias

Flyvbjerg and two colleagues have just published a working paper further unpacking one of the issues in How Big Things Get Done: uniqueness bias.  And it’s something that’s well worth unpacking.

Essentially this is ‘the tendency of planners and managers to see their projects as singular, one of a kind’ [p.3], a behavioural bias that ‘results in a distorted view of reality that underestimates risk and overestimates opportunity’ as project managers ‘think they have little or nothing to learn from other projects’ [p4].

The paper then uses a pretty hefty evidence base (219 projects across 34 organisations, in every continent) to show that ‘perceived uniqueness of projects matter, and the stronger it [the perception of uniqueness] is, the more likely the projects are to underperform’ [p.13].  It then goes on to show that ‘truly unique projects are not just rare, they are exceedingly uncommon, bordering on non-existent’ [p.15].

Consequently ‘intelligent leaders deal with uniqueness bias.  They see it for what it is, a behavioural fallacy, and avoid it’ [p.13]. And they do so by deploying a range of tools and approaches to manage and mitigate the dangers of this bias.

close to home

The evidence base for the working paper doesn’t seem to have included any universities, but that didn’t stop the lessons from this research resonating.

The tendency to regard projects as unique, a view often formed on the basis of small differences/variations from other projects.  The failure to learn and apply the lessons from past projects, due to an unwillingness to see commonalities between projects.  The inclination to look within an organisation for comparable projects, rather than to look outwards for similar projects implemented elsewhere, increasing the likelihood of falsely identifying a project as unique.

All of this echoed with things I’ve seen and experienced working in universities. Consequently the approaches set out in the paper to avoid this pitfall felt very relevant to how we manage projects in universities.

What also struck me was that this issue of uniqueness bias doesn’t just relate to the way that we manage projects in universities; it’s wider than that.  How often does the cry of ‘one size doesn’t fit all’ go up in our universities, with the result that we pay too much attention to the things that are different rather than the things that are similar?

an instance

For example a few years ago I was co-leading a workshop where the annual post mortem of NSS results was taking place.  I was with a breakout group consisting of academic leads for a number of subject areas, including one for a classroom/fieldwork discipline and the other for a classroom/laboratory subject.  The former subject had a track record of strong NSS results; the latter less so (to put it kindly).

The colleague from stronger performing subject pointed to the significant contribution they felt fieldwork made to their NSS results, due to the opportunities it offered to develop the sense of community and belonging between staff and students.  The colleague from the classroom/laboratory subject instantly jumped in to dismiss the relevance of this; their subject did and could not do fieldwork. Their subject was too different to learn anything from what the other subject was doing.

Which of course wasn’t the point.

The point wasn’t the activity (fieldwork), but the effect (the sense of community and belonging).  But rather than identify the common aim (the desire/need to create that sense of community) and consider if there might be different but similar opportunities in their discipline to achieve a similar effect (and there were), the colleague in question had focused only on the differences and in doing so closed down a potentially beneficial line of thought.

similar-different

Of course there are dangers when we don’t recognise relevant and valid differences between contexts and situations, and naively seek to apply more widely something that has worked in one context.

But I suspect that at times we move too quickly to identify the differences between one context/situation and another.  And then make the leap that because there are these differences, there is little that can be learned from the first context/situation that could usefully (with adaptation as needed) be applied to the second context/situation.  As a result we don’t seek to understand the similarities that sit alongside the differences, and what might be learned from those similarities.

Sometimes there’s a tendency to set up false dichotomies (change/continuity is another), which lead us to feel we need to lean one way or the other.  I suspect that at times that’s the case with similarity/difference, and that as a result the lessons of the dangers of uniqueness bias apply more widely in higher education than to just project management.