S3 Episode 3|034 On Scope, On Schedule, Off Purpose: Why Following the Plan Is Not the Same as Realizing the Purpose, with Tina Berger

S3 Episode 3|034 On Scope, On Schedule, Off Purpose: Why Following the Plan Is Not the Same as Realizing the Purpose, with Tina Berger

Here is a project every one of you has been near at some point. It finished on scope. It finished on schedule. It came in on budget, or close enough that nobody had to write a memo. The steering committee signed off. Somebody ordered a cake. And eighteen months later, the value that justified the whole thing had not shown up, and no one could quite say why. It was not the technology, and it was not the people resisting it. Somewhere along the way the organization started managing to the plan and stopped managing to the purpose, and because the plan was the thing being measured, the plan is the thing that got delivered.

Tina Berger has spent more than two decades advising Fortune 500 organizations on digital transformation and major capital and technology investments, much of it inside the energy industry, where capital discipline is about as mature as it gets. She began in the early 1990s as a technical writer, documenting the very processes organizations would later mistake for the point. Her conclusion after thirty years inside execution discipline: organizations optimize for process compliance when the purpose called for value realization.

The conversation runs from the technical writer standing in the gap between the documented work and the real work, through the anatomy of a compliant failure (the project manager who schedules the easiest fifty percent first, pilots that never scale, why people resist risk rather than change, and Diane Vaughan's Challenger finding that the processes worked and the alerts did not), into the front end nobody appreciates, why replicating the last project is not discovery, why staying responsive takes more rigor rather than less, and what belongs on a project dashboard. The last third takes it into AI, where leaders assume their data is as available as public data, and into Tina's book Invest Like a Mother and her memoir Coming Around: what invested means everywhere else in life, the oil and gas CEO who cut the dividend to keep his people, and the one thing Tina hopes leaders stop measuring themselves by.

Research referenced: Julian Orr, and John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid (canonical versus actual practice), Diane Vaughan (normalization of deviance), Ronald Heifetz (technical problems and adaptive challenges), David Snowden and Mary Boone (a leader's framework for decision making), Gary Klein (the premortem), V.F. Ridgway (dysfunctional consequences of performance measurement), Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky (loss aversion), Denise Rousseau (the psychological contract), and Adrienne Maree Brown (Emergent Strategy).

Full transcript and resources: https://www.2040digital.com/human-factor-podcast/human-factor-podcast-season-3-episode-034-on-scope-on-schedule-off-purpose-why-following-the-plan-is-not-the-same-as-realizing-the-purpose/
Find Tina at https://tinaberger.com and https://investlikeamother.net, and on LinkedIn.
Subscribe to the Ideas and Innovations newsletter: https://www.2040digital.com/home-2/ideas-and-innovations-newsletter-home-page-explore-all-issues/
The Truth About Transformation: Leading in the Age of AI, Uncertainty and Human Complexity: https://www.amazon.com/Truth-About-Transformation-Uncertainty-Complexity-ebook/dp/B0G3HSBZKD/