PM 505 Systems Concepts and Thinking In

PM 505 : Systems Concepts and Thinking In Project Management PM 505 Systems Concepts and Thinking In Project Management SYSTEM THINKING Sixth Meeting Archetypes Presentation Personal Mastery Lecturer: Dr Thanasis Spyridakos

PM 505 : Systems Concepts and Thinking In Project Management Personal Mastery Peter Senge says, “Personal mastery goes beyond competence and skills…it means approaching one’s life as a creative work, living life from a creative as opposed to a reactive viewpoint. ” Personal mastery is about creating what one wants in life and in work. Continually expanding personal mastery is a discipline based on a number of key principles and practices: • personal vision, • personal purpose, • holding creative tension between vision and current reality, • mitigating the impact of deeply rooted beliefs that are contrary to personal mastery, • commitment to truth, and • understanding the subconscious.

PM 505 : Systems Concepts and Thinking In Project Management Personal Mastery Organizations learn only through individual who learn. Individual learning does nor guarantee organizational learning. But whithout it no organizational learning occurs. Managers must redefine their jobs. They must give up the old dogma of planning, organizing and controlling and realise the almost sacredness for the lives of so many people, providing the enabling conditions for people to lead the most enriching lives they can.

PM 505 : Systems Concepts and Thinking In Project Management Personal Mastery When we pursue Personal Mastery we become more comfortable with ourselves, more able to appreciate and enjoy pleasures both large and small. Deepak Chopra connects purpose in life with health and longevity. I believe Personal Mastery followers enjoy better health than we would otherwise Personal Mastery fits with my values. I owe it to myself and to the people in my life. Some count on me to be role model; others depend on me to shoulder certain responsibilities; others, just to be there. Living in a Personal Mastery frame of mind makes life more fun, more exciting than just rocking along. The adrenaline rush of discovery, the quiet satisfaction of completing a task well or coaching a friend in a growth pattern disallow boredom and negative thinking Luck comes to those who create it for themselves by being alert to ideas and knowledge which others may overlook

PM 505 : Systems Concepts and Thinking In Project Management Personal Mastery PERSONAL MASTERY IS: 1) A journey of individual, personal, continuous improvement. ‘Journey’ and ‘continuous’ emphasize the ongoing nature of our pursuit of Personal Mastery. We do not march toward a destination but mine the gold along the way and relish its joys. Individual and personal remind us that while our growth is set in a context of other people and systems, we are responsible, we are in charge of our Personal Mastery. 2) Always looking for ways to grow, new things to learn, interesting people to meet. The devotee of Personal Mastery selects from the abundance of obvious opportunities for growth: books, tapes, lectures, courses, etc. The less obvious opportunities require assiduous attention to the learning potential in the people we involve ourselves with and the events of everyday. We speak of learning to learn. Most professionals acquire skills rapidly when needed. We also learn to expand our world and our self knowledge. 3) A way of life which stresses growth and satisfaction in personal and professional life. If we think of the time and energy we spend on ‘work’ (defined as activity that produces a pay-check) as just a way to earn money to support our personal life, we are missing a large piece of the potential richness of life. We can enjoy, grow and take delight in all of the parts of our lives.

PM 505 : Systems Concepts and Thinking In Project Management Mastery and Proficiency • Personal mastery goes beyond competence and skills, though it is grounded in competence and skills. It goes beyond spiritual unfolding or opening, although it requires spiritual growth. • Means approaching one’s life as acreative work, living life from a creative as opposed to reactive viewpoint. Personal mastery as a discipline: Continually clarifying what is important to us (juxtaposition of vision) Continually learning how to see current reality more clearly (clear picture of current rality). Learning in this context does not mean acquiring more information, but expanding the ability to produce the results we truly want in life. It is life long generative learning. Personal Mastery Suggests a special level of proficiency in every aspect of life.

PM 505 : Systems Concepts and Thinking In Project Management Personal Mastery Practitioners of personal mastery exhibit the following characteristics • They have a sense of purpose that lies behind their goals • Their vision is more like a calling than a good idea • They see current reality as an ally, not an enemy • They are committed to seeing reality increasingly accurately • They are extremely inquisitive • They do not resist, but work with, the forces of change • They feel connected to others and to life itself • They feel that they are part of a larger creative process that they can influence but cannot unilaterally control Senge links personal mastery to effective leadership stating, “The core leadership strategy is simple: be a model. Commit yourself to your own personal mastery. ”

PM 505 : Systems Concepts and Thinking In Project Management Personal Mastery – Why There is no fundamental trade off between the gigher virues in life and economic success. People • Become more committed, • Take more initiative • Have a broader ad deeper sense of responsibility • Learn faster To seek personal fulfillment only outsides od=f work and to ignore the significant portion of our lives which we spent working, would be to limit our opportunities to be happy and complete human beings. The fullest development of people is o an equal plane with financial success.

PM 505 : Systems Concepts and Thinking In Project Management Personal Mastery - Resistance Unquantifiable concepts such as intuition and personal mastery are not attractive. The contribution of personal mastery to the results cannot be measured. Cynicism. People with high ideas usually become cynical about personal mastery disappointed, hurt by some reasons. Some fear that personal mastery will threaten the established order of a well-managed company. Empowering people to share a common vision and common mental models about the business reality will reduce the stress and the burden of management to maintenance coherence and direction

PM 505 : Systems Concepts and Thinking In Project Management Personal Vision Purpose and Vision are different concepts. Puropose is similar to the direction. Vision is a specific destination, a picture of a desired future. Purpose is abstract, Vision is concrete. Purpose is “advancing man’s capability to explore the haven” while vision is “a man on the moon by the ends of 60 s. Vision has underlying sense of purpose Purpose without vision has no senseof appropraite scale Vision is intrinsic not relative Vision is multifaceted (there are material facets of our vision)

PM 505 : Systems Concepts and Thinking In Project Management Holding creative tension People aware about eh gap of vision and reality. The principles of creative tension is the central principle of personal mastery, integrating all elements of the discipline. Emotional tension is different to creative tension. Pressure to lower vision Emotional Tension vision GAP (CREATIVE TENSION Actions to achieve vision Current Reality Delay

PM 505 : Systems Concepts and Thinking In Project Management STRUCTURAL CONFLICTS Conflicts: • Belief in powerlessness • Belief centers on unworthiness –belief that we do not deserve what we truly desire. The examples of the two rubbers. Generic strategies with problems and limitations deeply habitual and cannot change overnight: • Letting our vision erode • Conflict manipulation • Psych ourselves up to overpower all forms of resistance to achieve our goals How may begin to alter the deeper structures to our lives?

PM 505 : Systems Concepts and Thinking In Project Management Commitment ot the truth Means a relentless willingness to root out the ways we limit or deceive ourselves from seeing what is, and to coninually challenge out theories of why things are the way are. Recognize the structural conflicts Charles Dickens’s – A Christmas Carol

PM 505 : Systems Concepts and Thinking In Project Management Using the Subconscious Implicit in the practice of personal mastery is another dimension of the mind, the subconscious. Our lives are full of myriad complex taks which we hardle quite competently with almost no conscious thought. Unconscious or automated mind. Responsiveness of the subconscious to a clear focus. Make clear choice between interim goals and more intrinsic goals.

PM 505 : Systems Concepts and Thinking In Project Management Integrating Reason and Intuition/Seeing our connectedness to the world/Compassion Integration of reason and Intuition. Nature seems to have learned to design in pairs. Closing the loops. To continually expand our awareness and understanding to see more and more of the interdependencies between actions and our reality, to see more and more of our connectedness to the world around us. Know the structures of the system. Understand clearly the pressures influencing one another, develop compassion and empathy.

PM 505 : Systems Concepts and Thinking In Project Management Personal Mastery enables us to look after ourselves economically. The day of the parental company offering lifetime employment is gone. We carry our portfolios of qualities and skills with us. An ongoing effort to be better people and better at what we do is connected with prosperity. We who are in business for ourselves "eat what we grow. " Our lives are like a selfsustaining farm; we live by what we create. Employees of large and small organizations are wise to take a similar view. Dedication to Personal Mastery equips us to forge a collaborative relationship with organizations that both need our skills and provide us with growth opportunities A central piece of endeavor in Personal Mastery is self understanding. Just living may advance our understanding of self some; pursuing the knowledge and understanding of self rewards us with fuller comprehension of who we are. We must recognize our world view, our mental models, in order to understand our needs, wants and reactions. Once we bring mental models into awareness, we can make changes if we choose. With awareness and dedication to our own growth, we truly can recreate ourselves One hallmark of the growing person is the management of the present reality and the vision of the future. We can bring present thinking and vision together by: accepting the tension between what is now and what will be; believing that we can make the journey from now into our future; seeing our vision as including the present, that is, living the vision now.

PM 505 : Systems Concepts and Thinking In Project Management Personal mastery Discipline stands alone as an absolute necessity for Personal Mastery. Without it, personal habits and outside influences control our daily lives. Disciplining ourselves to do the work of Personal Mastery is not the easiest thing to do and sometimes unpleasant. We choose to suffer the pain of discipline rather than the pain of regret. The pain of regret is nagging and ongoing. The pain of discipline subsides with persistence. The first discipline is to recognize that we must change and that change consumes time and energy and often brings discomfort. ‘Self’ and ‘system’ make up an environment. All aspects of our environment, especially the people in it can teach us something useful. Take advantage of others’ insight. Listen! Everyone has something to tell us. About people, we choose the people we mix with on an ongoing basis. We intentionally surround ourselves with positive, caring, growing, realistic, fun people and mix with others sparingly. If we can help negative, struggling people, we do gladly. If not, we put some space between us and them. We discipline ourselves to keep failure in perspective as a learning experience. No experience is final unless we see it as so. Personal Mastery requires disciplining ourselves to give up time-wasters and put our time on achieving our goals. This is not to say that we are always dead serious and working at something that looks like work; we have fun, too!

PM 505 : Systems Concepts and Thinking In Project Management Personal Master the Process Practicing the “Kaizen” of Personal Mastery means that you are committed to the continuous improvement of everything you do, in all areas of your life. This is an ongoing journey of learning, where your results reflect feedback for the future, not failure. Moreover, mastery implies that because you value your innate gifts, you set up structures and support in your life, in order to fully and reliably express them. So-called selfdiscipline, then, is not an act of controlling and punishing yourself, but is motivated by self-love. Mastery doesn’t block unfolding from within, but catalyzes and sustains it. For some exceptional folks it may be fine to just flow with the spontaneous expression of the self, yet for the rest of us, both inspiration and structure are required. Inspiration alone risks loosing momentum, and structure without spirit crumbles in the dust. In my private practice for example, my clients may engage in deep hypnotic process work, and we also discuss specific daily actions to follow through on the inner shifts that have occurred.

PM 505 : Systems Concepts and Thinking In Project Management Personal Master Internal Synergy “Mastery” does not necessarily imply “controlling” anyone, including oneself. What works over time is to integrate the various and often conflicting aspects of personality. The goal is to get all of you on the same team, working together, instead of internal struggle, sometimes bordering on warfare. For example, you may well be able to make yourself stay away from cigarettes, for a while… But eventually the “control” stops working, and the old habits come back. Unless the reasons why you smoked in the first place are addressed effectively, change is unlikely to last. To develop enduring new good habits, all parts of your being need to be honored and understood, not suppressed and conquered.

PM 505 : Systems Concepts and Thinking In Project Management Personal Master Personal Power As you create internal synergy, your personal power grows, and you then naturally take the driver’s seat to your destiny. This includes assuming complete responsibility for the direction your life is headed. You realize that you can create anything you want, within your circle of influence, and according to your skills, talents and competence. Some say this takes selfdiscipline. I prefer to use the term personal power, and with that the willingness to be at choice. Real power comes from listening to the stirrings of soul. Becoming who you are meant to be means living in harmony with the mysterious heartbeat of life itself. Unfolding your potential can not be made to happen from the level of ego, it can only be supported by creating the right conditions. In the end, Personal Mastery is the journey of tapping your full potential as a human being – through being the leader of your life, and by cocreating with the spirit that runs through you

PM 505 : Systems Concepts and Thinking In Project Management Personal Mastery Performing a personal SWOT analysis can help you cultivate valuable management skills. In the book The Fifth Discipline, Peter Senge identifies five core disciplines required of a learning organisation: personal mastery, shared vision, mental models, team learning, and systems thinking. From the perspective of the nimble project manager, a project environment is the ultimate learning organisation—and Senge’s disciplines provide an easy-to-use and robust conceptual framework for approaching every project. The word mastery derives from the Sanskrit word mah, meaning greater. Mah is also the root of the French word maitre, which means proficient or highly skilled. To the nimble project manager, the concept of personal mastery translates into a complex weave of self-knowledge, the cultivation and refinement of a wide number of skills, and the personal commitment to support a similar growth in others.

PM 505 : Systems Concepts and Thinking In Project Management Personal Mastery Conducting a personal SWOT review Our starting point is self-knowledge. So it makes sense to begin with a SWOT review—an assessment of our strengths, weaknesses, current opportunities, and a determination of what situations in our life are bringing out the worst in us, both professionally and personally (threats). We’ve all done SWOT reviews on projects, but in this case, we’ll be turning the lens on ourselves. The next step is to question why you’ve classified your strengths and weaknesses as you have. A couple of key questions arise: Who are you really? How valid is your determination of your strengths and weaknesses? Who are you really? Question “You can try to get me to change my habits and my quirks, but it’s a waste of time trying to get me to change my character flaws. ” We can all sand the rough edges and stop saying things that people find annoying, but we can’t fundamentally change who we are. From the perspective of the nimble project manager, this is a perfectly acceptable constraint. After all, one of the key components of nimbleness is an ability to maximise the return based on the real situation.

PM 505 : Systems Concepts and Thinking In Project Management SWOT ANALYSIS To carry out a SWOT Analysis, print off our free worksheet, and write down answers to the following questions: Strengths: • What advantages does you have? • What do you do better than anyone else? • What unique do you have access to? • What do people see as your strengths? Consider this from an internal perspective, and from the point of view of your customers and people in your market. And be realistic: It's far too easy to fall prey to "not invented here syndrome". In looking at your strengths, think about them in relation to others, if all other provide for a strength the same as you, then this is not a strength, it is a necessity.

PM 505 : Systems Concepts and Thinking In Project Management SWOT ANALYSIS Weaknesses: • What could you improve? • What should you avoid? • What are people see as weaknesses? Again, consider this from an internal and external basis: Do other people seem to perceive weaknesses that you do not see? Are other doing any better than you? It is best to be realistic now, and face any unpleasant truths as soon as possible.

PM 505 : Systems Concepts and Thinking In Project Management SWOT ANALYSIS Opportunities: • Where are the good opportunities facing you? • What are the interesting trends you are aware of? Useful opportunities can come from such things as: • Changes in technology and markets on both a broad and narrow scale • Changes in government policy related to your field • Changes in social patterns, population profiles, lifestyle changes, etc. • Local Events A useful approach to looking at opportunities is to look at your strengths and ask yourself whether these open up any opportunities. Alternatively, look at your weaknesses and ask yourself whether you could open up opportunities by eliminating them.

PM 505 : Systems Concepts and Thinking In Project Management SWOT ANALYSIS Threats: • What obstacles do you face? • What is your competition doing? • Are the required specifications changing? • Is changing anything threatening your position? • Do you have problems? • Could any of your weaknesses seriously threaten you? Carrying out this analysis will often be illuminating - both in terms of pointing out what needs to be done, and in putting problems into perspective. Strengths and weaknesses are often internal factors. Opportunities and threats often relate to external factors. For this reason the SWOT Analysis is sometimes called Internal-External Analysis and the SWOT Matrix is sometimes called an IE Matrix Analysis Tool.

PM 505 : Systems Concepts and Thinking In Project Management Personal Mastery Nimble project managers know that they’re not perfect, and the folks on their team aren’t perfect, but they also know that everyone is capable of effective contribution. The ability to accept what is fixed and change what is mutable is one of the most important skills a nimble project manager has. It’s the basis of all risk management and the secret to issue management. It’s the fundamental understanding that allows the PM to appropriately staff the project team with the right people. So it only goes without saying that this ability to see things for what they are becomes especially profitable when turned toward oneself. Evaluating strengths and weaknesses So how do you tell the difference between a personality trait or a less-flattering character flaw and a simple weakness that can be fixed? A good place to start is with a personality profile. The Myers-Briggs typology assigns a combination of four paired attributes to a person: Extrovert/Introvert, i. Ntuitive/Sensing, Thinking/Feeling, and Judging/Perceiving.

PM 505 : Systems Concepts and Thinking In Project Management Personal Mastery The social styles model breaks people's preferred approach to working with others into four styles: Driver, Expressive, Amiable, and Analytical. And the enneagram has a complex model of eight types with subpersonalities. None of these models is the perfect answer to the questions of “Who am I? ” and “What are my strengths and weaknesses? " But such models can provide some important insight into our innate comfort zones and where we may have to stretch occasionally to be successful. An example from my own experience came from a class I taught several years ago. During one session, I explained the Myers-Briggs typology. A student came up to me later and said, “You’re a T, most of the people in the class are Ts, but I’m an F and you’re not speaking in my language. Too much head and not enough heart. ” In the language of personal mastery, what I’d been told was that I had a strength called Thinking/i. Ntuition, which enabled me to translate amorphous “knowing” into clearly articulated words and concepts, but I had a blind spot that needed work: the ability to take that knowing and communicate to someone who was looking for something other than an intellectual discourse.

PM 505 : Systems Concepts and Thinking In Project Management Personal Mastery The project context In the world of software and NPD project management, the nimble project manager is usually surrounded by INTs— Introverted, i. Ntuitive Thinkers. This shifts the communication difficulty I faced in my class to the dilemma of an Extrovert (which most nontechnical PMs are) communicating with an Introvert. If we assume for our purposes here that we are all Ts (Thinkers rather than Feelers), the best definition of an Extrovert is someone who needs external feedback to clarify his or her thoughts. An Introvert, on the other hand, takes in external data and clarifies by measuring it against his or her internal process. In a project setting, this difference means that meetings are the perfect tool for Extroverts to work things out, and they can be a perfect forum for Introverts to convey their well-thoughtout and well-reasoned ideas. The problem is that Introverts and Extroverts automatically have a different rhythm for the number of meetings they need and want and different goals for what should be accomplished in the meeting.

PM 505 : Systems Concepts and Thinking In Project Management Personal Mastery By understanding the difference between Extroverts and Introverts, the nimble project manager is freed from having to push a one-size-fits-all solution on the project team. Functional teams (usually a group of Extroverts) can schedule as many meetings as they want or need to think out loud, while the development team members can sit in their cubes, collaborating when they need to through Web-based discussion threads. Meetings where both groups need to be present (status meetings, etc. ) can then be conducted with a middle-ground goal in mind. Less frequency or shorter durations and clearly defined agendas actually tend to keep both groups happy. The key to this discussion is that a strength and what may appear to be a weakness can be flipsides of the same coin and can be maximised or minimised based on circumstances. A senior VP at an engineering and construction firm brought this message home to me one night at a meeting when he was advising project managers to make sure they included “a fuzzy thinker” on their staff to be successful. In Myers-Briggs language, that translated to the statement “Make sure that you have at least one NP (i. Ntuitive/Perceiving) on your staff instead of just all those SJs (Sensing/Judging) you normally have. ”

PM 505 : Systems Concepts and Thinking In Project Management Personal Mastery Since software projects tend to have a plethora of NPs, it took me a minute to realise that his root advice was to staff at least one or more persons on the project to compensate for the blind spot that all teams naturally seem to have. In software projects, this often translates to making sure that there are QA people (often SJs) who are involved throughout the project and with sufficient status and inclusion to be able to offer their own unique perspective. Assessing opportunities and threats The second part of our personal SWOT analysis involves analyzing our opportunities and threats. In the case of the nimble project manager, an opportunity is defined as a working environment where success is possible. A threat is defined as a project where personal failure is probably inevitable. A current mythos circulating in our community suggests that a good PM can manage any type of project. For the nimble project manager, this statement is effectively false, even if it might be literally true in its most narrow construction.

PM 505 : Systems Concepts and Thinking In Project Management Personal Mastery For example, I’ve learned that I have the highest probability of success with rapid, mission-critical projects, where the desperation factor keeps the political and procedural gameplaying at bay. I often end up coming in to turn around projects that are about to fail—or killing the ones that just won’t die. Other project managers I know are outstanding at three-year projects with incredibly complex plans and a team numbering in the hundreds. One of the key components in personal mastery is having the wisdom to recognise where we excel and having the strength of ego to understand that there are times when someone else really can do it better than we can. The concept of personal mastery requires that we look at what we do well and maximise our opportunity to share those skills in the right circumstances. It also demands that we be honest about both our zones of rigidity (our fish-out-of-water circumstances) and our weaknesses, and that we avoid the one and develop compensatory techniques to mitigate the effects of the other.

PM 505 : Systems Concepts and Thinking In Project Management Personal Mastery It should be obvious to everyone that this discussion of personal mastery has completely avoided focusing on issues such as how to build a better risk plan or complete a more accurate schedule. Personal mastery does include the cultivation of top-notch skills. But the secret of developing those skills involves having the self-knowledge to identify the skills that will naturally make up the nimble PM toolkit and which skills need to be acquired or hired to compensate for blind spots. Making it happen Personal mastery isn’t something that’s achieved overnight. But by making the commitment to conduct a personal SWOT and investing the time to gain the language of self description (Myers-Briggs, social styles, enneagram)—as well as by relying on sound PM practices, such as keeping a project journal and doing personal project post-mortems—the required discipline to develop and maintain personal mastery can become second nature for any nimble project manager