Regulation drives the certainty – Gavin Newsom

Laying the Groundwork

Let’s start with a definition of certainty often employed: the state of being completely confident about something.

People’s biases towards confidence and certainty (which eschews risk) and that of organizations vary widely:

  • Most people need and like certainty for safety, allowing them to function based on their belief that if they do A, then B will follow. They navigate intersections, put money in banks and follow dictated processes to keep their jobs. Governor Newsom’s statement above implies certainty – no maybe or probability involved.
  • Disruption can create negative consequences, so people and organizations modify or add process steps. When a sink hole in a highway disrupts traffic, remedial repair work leads to detours which temporarily cost drivers more time. Organizations continually add a steady trickle of permanent processes in response to disruptions. People accept such process growth as long as it is not significant or urgent.
  • Significant change events rupture certainty causing people to turn to their leaders. Leading includes convincing anxious followers to take personal risk as they journey through uncertainty. Leaders rely on four things in such situations: trust based on developed relationships, their logic making sense to their followers, their emotional bond based on ethics, charisma and inspiration and the reward of a certain return to stability.
  • People also crave a degree of variety which brings some risk and uncertainty: they change jobs, work towards promotions, join new social groups, date, have children, and take excursions on cruise ships. These cautious risk-takers willingly enter uncertain waters based on the moderate level or risk and their assessment of the probable reward.
  •  There are also those who mean it when they say “The only things certain are death and taxes”. They see risks in everything and are typically pessimistic or even paranoid. Such people are unlikely to be on any team facing significant challenges and the related uncertainty.
  • Finally, there are the serious risk-takers. They pursue risk and uncertainty because they desire ultra-significant rewards – to do good, become billionaires, or achieve a Guinness World Record. Some rely on competency and discipline to reach distant goals – to become Olympians, to write books and to climb mountains. Others pursue disruptive innovations with little discipline or study and no regard for the potentially disastrous outcomes – the entrepreneurs, the criminal masterminds and many heroes.  

Democracies face exceptionally complex challenges, and those who pursue governing tend to cautiously crave risk or are serious risk-takers. Certainty is fleeting if not nonexistent. Compromise is the governing principle, which often means that there is certainty about a degree of pain and reward for groups with different needs. This result is common in Canada’s far-flung regional communities with very different needs.

One pursuit of certainty should never be compromised in democracies. Abraham Maslow indicated this in 1943 with his Theory of Motivation (later called his Hierarchy of Needs). For those who govern, the personal security of its citizens from the multitude of threats to their wellbeing must be their top priority, that including the health of the Canadian Armed Forces. Without that certainty, citizens are traveling through life, much like driving through a city that is renowned for dangerous gangs at night, without an insurance policy or GPS.

Today, geopolitical and domestic threats to Canadians’ way of life are abundant. Addressing all these threats introduces a level of complexity yet to be mastered by any democracy.

If it is not yet obvious to the reader, everything stated above as certain is questionable. Nevertheless humour me and consider the foregoing as the current environment.

Enter Complex Projects

What do I mean by a complex project and why discuss them?

I have routinely relied on the broad definition employed by the International Centre for Complex Project Management (ICCPM), which defines it in five dimensions:

  • Structural complexity implies multiple partners, stakeholders or suppliers, large numbers of interconnected activities and interdependencies.
  • Technical complexity includes the development or integration of new technologies into new or modified products or services.
  • Directional complexity frequently is exhibited by a misalignment of project goals or expectations, hidden agendas or the loss of original intent (e.g. when handing over to a new leader or team).
  • Temporal complexity occurs in a shifting of the environment or strategic direction over time, often experienced during mergers or changes of government.

I believe it is important to add too other typical attributes. Such projects routinely have long life spans and are exceptionally expensive.

Why write this note? I observed over a decade with a portfolio of such procurement projects that all of these dimensions of complex projects were present to some degree in weapons systems platform acquisitions by the Canadian government. Begging Heisenberg’s forgiveness regarding his scientific Uncertainty Principle, I suggest that complex projects demonstrate his principle: you rarely know where a project really is in its journey and when it will deliver the target outcomes because these are uncertain. 

Some examples may make the point. A key political staff member insisted on a harebrain strategy, introducing years of delay. A requirement was levied for over six approvals to modify a pre-existing design by the Prime. A change of senior personnel created misalignment of influential stakeholders and weeks of confusion. The insistence that a truck project be broken into nine contracts took months to achieve a viable approach. Seniors with influence operated outside their lanes over years which led to project cancellations before contracts were to be awarded. These events (from my tally of over 25) all preceded the real work of construction approval.

Unlike the common belief about process regulated activities – including when tailoring complex project approaches – certainty is not an attribute amid complexity. As demonstrated above, unexpected risks emerge routinely and some even offer insufficient evidence to point towards a ‘best’ future. Nor is there certainty if you apply all the latest technique for taming complexity in projects, a fact that makes it difficult to gain adoption of complex project techniques. In essence, this is counter to what people believe (including Governor Newman) in terms of following processes to achieve certainty, let alone the maze developed over decades by a multitude of government authorities.

Most complexity theorists argue that every complex project is a unique risk environment. Thus such projects should be tailored to fit the expected challenges and execution team’s capabilities. An advantage to such tailoring is that this can avoid the lesson-based continual addition of unnecessary process complexity debt currently infecting weapons system platform acquisitions.

Leadership of complex project execution teams includes what is described above and more, but on steroids. However one focus stands out as critical to success – the judicious selection and preparation of the execution team, which includes selecting the processes to navigate the unforeseeable risks ahead. I and others argue that this up-front investment is more important than any other enablers of project success, including a focus on the sibling efficiency measures of cost and schedule. One of Ben Franklin’s quotes was never more valid than for complex projects: “By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail”.

Because serious risk-takers are open-minded and comfortable considering risky scenarios, they are extremely valuable in complex project execution teams as part of the risk treatment team – but as a small part of that team. They complement the larger cadre of cautious risk-takers. 

In a somewhat related vein, those risk-takers who choose to join complex project execution teams crave the challenges of such endeavours – this being more hit and miss for those assigned. They expect and revel in a fast paced journey with many risky disruptions that will test the team’s ability to minimize the impacts of such surprises. I often describe such projects as collaborative activities of adaptation, characterized as back-to-back-to-back marathon relay races. For these people, such activity is in itself adequate reward.

Given the tremendously complex issues facing government leaders, those involved in government complex projects understand that government authorities may issue directions that are less than ‘best for project. Such challenges are seen as the necessary compromises between what the user community needs and what the investing stakeholder requires.

Notwithstanding the hierarchy of stakeholders, complex weapon systems platform acquisition personnel understand that all influential and interested stakeholders matter. These stakeholders can disrupt continually so as to slow progress significantly which may lead to cancellation. Execution team members therefore also value collaboration and transparency, activities that are too often difficult to achieve due to uncertainty. As recently highlighted by Philippe Lagassé in a Debating Canadian Defence post, it is important to understand that complex endeavours are best qualified with nuances (i.e. with the phrase ‘it depends’) because so much cannot be foreseen with certainty.

Looked at through a different lens, the day-to-day complexity of federal governing means that the procurement of ‘big things’ does not often get launched early enough to ensure proper preparation and effective implementation. Whether a weapons systems platform acquisition project or an infrastructure project of the current government’s Major Projects Office, they are complex and uncertain in many ways. This leads to two conclusions:

  • Where projects are started too late, riskier measures such as sole-sourcing and leasing must be pursued.
  • Setting ‘reach’ goals for complex projects without managing expectations can be disastrous for the project, the Canadian Armed Forces and Canada.

The Takeaway – Get Real With Expectations

The first takeaway was mentioned earlier but bears repeating – you have the right to disagree with my declarative statements about complex projects.

That said those experienced in complex military platform acquisition projects know that nothing is certain until a project is delivered and in-service for many years. Everything should be qualified as uncertain until that point. This is fundamental because of the myriad of stakeholders and the inherent challenges of technological advances that drive continual project disruptions.

The one certainty in this business that I support is that complex projects to build big things will all suffer from disruptive events. I am certain that their journey will be uncertain, no matter what Governor Newsom proclaimed about regulation.

This means that the essential job of project execution teams is to minimize the harm to the desired outcomes created by emerging risks.

While much can be accelerated without damage through the efforts of the new Defence Investment Agency, such uncertainty will not go away.  And given the current popularity of the word ‘investment’, you can take that to the bank.