Page 72 - Straight Talk On Project Management IV

exercise! The project was promptly killed, and the challenger firm’s app was adopted across the
whole business.

It's interesting that no-one acted upon the new reality when the merger was announced, nobody
even asked the question “are we wasting our time?”. It’s even more interesting that, even now, my
friend and his team believe that they should have been allowed to continue with their work. Sound
familiar?

We shouldn’t beat ourselves up about it, it is human nature. To illustrate this, let me share an
extreme example.

I remember reading about a cult in the USA in the 1950s. A housewife, who claimed to be a psychic
and in touch with a god-like being from another planet, predicted that the world would end on 21st
December 1954. She warned her friends of the impending disaster and told them that true believers
would be rescued, at midnight, by a spaceship.

I mean, where do you even start with this? Imagine a friend of yours sharing this ‘knowledge’ with
you. You’d ask, “Is everything alright at home, hun?”

Some of this woman’s friends left their jobs and their families and moved in with her to wait for
salvation.
Leon Festinger, a renowned sociologist of the day, infiltrated the cult interested to see what was
driving their behaviour but, more importantly, see what they did when the time of apocalypse
passed, and no spaceship arrived.

Logic suggests that the cult followers would declare their leader a fraud, that they’d get their coats
and leave, return to their regular lives.

Instead, as midnight came and passed, they became even more emboldened in their beliefs. Rather
than declare this an unmitigated failure they altered the evidence before their eyes to fit with their
world view - the god-like beings had clearly been so impressed with their faith that they had spared
the planet. The cult was convinced they had saved the world and went on a recruitment drive with
this message.

In his books “When Prophecy Fails” and “A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance”, Festinger concluded
that this behaviour isn’t confined to cults – it affects all of us. When confronted with evidence that
challenges our deeply entrenched beliefs, we tend to reframe the evidence rather than change our
beliefs. We create new justifications, explanations and reasons to counter the evidence.

Festinger coined the phrase “cognitive dissonance”. We like to think that we are making smart and
rational decisions and judgements. Often, we’re not!

This doesn’t make us bad people. Leon Festinger suggests that we human beings strive for internal
psychological consistency to be able to function mentally in our real world, internal inconsistency
causes psychological discomfort and we are programmed to find the quickest way to reduce the
cognitive dissonance. Against this backdrop you can understand why cult members blindly follow
their leader, politicians defend bad policy decisions, voters vote for the same party their whole lives,
sports fans stick with their team through thick and thin and why sometimes we follow a failing IT
Project over the precipice.

The question is, in IT Projects, how do you counter it?