A 100‐year‐old iconic company admired for decades as the most innovative company in diverse industries from automotive to electronics, healthcare, and consumer products appoints a new CEO in 2000. His focus is on execution and operational efficiencies as he implements Six Sigma to streamline work processes and focus on cost efficiency and quality control. The company was 3M, well‐known for innovations like Scotch tape and Post‐it notes. What do you think would be the impact of process rigidity on an innovative company like 3M?

While there were efficiency gains and operating margins grew from 17 percent to 23 percent, there was a dramatic fall in the number of innovative products developed in those years. According to Fast Company magazine, 3M fell from number 1 in 2004 to number 7 on the most innovative companies list. James McNerney, the CEO of 3M from 2000 to 2005 applied Six Sigma across the board. Six Sigma is process heavy and aims to remove variability to avoid errors and increase predictability. Developed at Motorola, Six Sigma was adapted by Fortune companies like GE, Honeywell, and many others in the 1990s. Processes like Six Sigma are about consistency and control and work well in a mechanical world, whereas the DANCE and disruption are characteristic of difference, failure, disorder, learning, and mutation.

Project management and PMOs face a similar challenge as they are perceived as top‐down, controlling, and bureaucratic, stifling innovation in an increasingly DANCE and disruptive world. On the other end of the extreme, there are start‐ups and companies with very little or no process, and chaotic, free‐for‐all cultures with no boundaries and constantly shifting focus. Any management process, whether it is Six Sigma or project management or project management office (PMO), can be beneficial, but the challenge is knowing how much is right for your organization and business. Failure stems from either too much or too little governance and process. The challenge is that to thrive, you need to find your sweet spot between the two extremes.

In his book, Seeing What Others Don't: The Remarkable Ways We Gain Insight, cognitive psychologist Gary Klein argues:

Organizations are preventing insights by imposing too many controls and procedures in order to reduce or eliminate errors. Organizations value predictability and abhor mistakes. That's why they impose management controls that stifle insights. If organizations truly want to foster innovation and increase discoveries, their best strategy is to cut back on the practices that interfere with insights, but that will be very difficult for them to do. Organizations are afraid of the unpredictable and disruptive properties of insights and are afraid to loosen their grip on the control strategies.

In this chapter, we address the question of how to achieve true agility by finding your sweet spot between the two extremes. It is important to prepare the right operating system before we delve into decoding and developing the DNA of strategy execution for project management and PMO practices.

HOW TO REFRAME THE ORGANIZATIONAL OPERATING SYSTEM AND MINDSET

“The most common source of management mistakes is not the failure to find the right answers. It is the failure to ask the right questions …. Nothing is more dangerous in business than the right answer to the wrong question.

Peter Drucker

The next generation depends on questions. In the past, we relied on answers, but in today's world as the DANCE intensifies and uncertainty increases, the value of questions goes up, and the value of answers goes down. It is harder to understand the problem than to have answers that are no longer relevant. How can you expect different outcomes with the same questions? The challenge is to learn to ask better questions. While solutions tend to converge and pacify, questions have the opposite effect. They agitate and cultivate a mindset for agility, constantly challenging the status‐quo, seeking diverging perspectives, and pushing to the edge. To better prepare for the DANCE and disruption, you have to reframe the organizational mindset and create a culture of inquiry. Questions are like lenses that provide a multiplicity of perspectives and unlock new doors.

The PMO can take a leading role in fostering a question‐based culture across the organization by holding up the mirror and reflecting the right questions in a multidisciplinary way, bridging silos and reconnecting different aspects of the DNA of strategy execution. Traditional project management and PMOs are typically focused on finding answers and providing solutions for execution. The next‐generation PMO should start by challenging if you are working on the right problems and projects by using different questioning techniques.

In our next‐generation PMO seminars, we start with a question‐storming exercise. It is a divergent process designed to come up with a multiplicity of perspectives with the power of questions, as opposed to brainstorming, which is convergent honing on multiple solutions to one problem. Hal Gregersen, executive director of the MIT Leadership Center and senior lecturer at the MIT Sloan School, explains:

Regular brainstorming for ideas often hits a wall because we only have so many ideas. And the reason we hit that wall is we're asking the wrong questions …. It's perfect to step back and say: Okay, question storming time. And what do I mean by that? If I'm with the team: Grab a flip chart. Have someone be the scribe and have the team generate at least 50 questions about the problem that we're stuck on. Number those questions. Write them down up there, when they are being written down other team members are paying attention and thinking of a better question. Do it again and again and again. But what we discover is that when people then step back and do that kind of question storming, list a long series of questions and they do it collectively where they can see the questions and generate new ones, it actually gets them closer to the right question that will give them the right answer. And that's where question storming compliments traditional brainstorming.

Hal has developed a methodology—catalytic questioning, an alternative to traditional brainstorming—business leaders can use to drive change in their lives, workplaces, and communities. It takes just five simple steps:

1. Gather employees around a writing surface.
2. Choose the right problem.
3. Engage in pure question talk.
4. Identify the “catalytic” questions (questions that hold the most potential for disrupting the status quo). Focus on a few questions that your team honestly can't answer but is ready and willing to investigate. Winnow your questions down to three or four that truly matter.
5. Find a solution.

Question storming is also referred to as Q‐storming by Marilee Adams, in her book Change Your Questions, Change Your Life. She elaborates that the goal in Q‐storming is to generate as many questions as possible. The expectation is that some of these questions will provide desired new openings or directions. Typically, questions open thinking, while answers often close thinking. Q‐storming is based on three premises: (1) great results begin with great questions; (2) most any problem can be solved with enough of the right questions; and (3) the questions we ask ourselves often provide the most fruitful openings for new thinking and possibilities.

In the Q‐storming exercise, groups of stakeholders start with what questions we need to ask for the PMO to provide greater value to the organization, or what questions we should be asking to take the PMO to the next level.

Table 2.1 is an unedited Q‐storm from one of our PMO facilitation workshops.

After a Q‐storming exercise, we typically hear comments like, “This was an eye‐opener … we didn't know we had to think about all these things … before I came to this session, my focus was so narrow … now we know we are not even thinking about the right things.…”

Project managers and PMOs must shift from a fixation on the solution toward learning to ask better questions that help reframe the problem and provide a different point of view and open new doors. The questioning approach will raise the quality of planning, risk management, and surfacing assumptions, among other things. Questioning is an art and skill that has to be learned and developed. Table 2.2 shows sample questioning techniques compiled from different sources.

Throughout the book, we will be using questions to open new doors and keep seeking new insights to develop intelligence in each of the elements of the DNA.

“I would rather have questions that can't be answered than answers which can't be questioned.”

Richard Feynman

One of the questions to start with is why half of PMOs are not perceived as successful? According to the Project Management Institute's Pulse of the Profession, 2017, 71 percent of organizations have a PMO, up from 61 percent in 2007. Even though PMOs have become a common organizational fixture in many organizations, the success rate has not gone up. According to Projectize Group's survey‐based PMO research (2005–2017), 52 percent of PMOs are not perceived as successful by key PMO stakeholders. 39 percent responded that the relevance or existence of their PMOs has been seriously questioned. These findings are echoed by other reports from various organizations over the years, including a multiyear PMO study by Brian Hobbs and Monique Aubrey, PMO: A Quest for Understanding.

Often, you learn more from questioning why something doesn't work than from why it does. One of the exercises we conduct in our practice is to ask the key stakeholders an important question: What can you do in your PMO to ensure it does not succeed? This is backward thinking, a technique, explained by Peter Bevlin, in his book Seeking Wisdom. Instead of asking how we can achieve a goal, we ask the opposite question: What don't I want to achieve (non‐goal)? What causes the non‐goal? How can I avoid that? What do I now want to achieve? How can I do that?

What can you do in your PMO to ensure it does not succeed? (non‐goal)

Typical responses we see listed are …

• Don't communicate the purpose of the PMO
• Disconnect between strategy and execution
• Lack of business understanding and focus
• Require too many mandated bureaucratic processes
• Don't explain why they have to follow PMO processes
• No training or support
• Don't define roles/responsibility clearly
• Inflexibility and one‐size‐fits‐all policies
• Not addressing the current needs and pain points of the organization
• Set high expectations and unachievable goals
• Punish people for not following processes
• Reward bad behaviors
• Don't pay attention to organizational culture or politics
• Don't plan for organizational change management
• Lack of stakeholder and customer engagement
• Don't care or plan for stakeholder buy‐in for the PMO
• Stumbling block for new ideas and innovation
• Slow down agility
• Lack of understanding of reality of DANCE and disruption

An interesting outcome of this exercise is that, invariably, it surfaces the following top reasons why organizational project management or PMOs fail:

• Unclear purpose
• No buy‐in
• Perception of more red tape, bureaucracy, and overhead
• Quick‐fix to deep‐rooted problems
• Project management policing
• Too academic and far from reality—professionalism and quality for its own sake
• Veneer of participation and hidden agendas
• Politics and power struggles
• High expectations and fuzzy focus
• Hard to prove value

The preceding reasons are prevalent because traditional approaches are skewed toward a top‐down, controlling, policing, rigid, and bureaucratic project management and PMO based on a mechanical mindset. They do not recognize the DANCE and are unaware that they are playing a different game, which requires a different approach as discussed in the first chapter. It is important to understand fundamental distinctions between traditional or foundational approaches, and evolving start‐up, organic, and agile approaches.

DISTINGUISHING TRADITIONAL VERSUS EVOLVING APPROACHES

Figure 2.1 highlights the distinctions between foundational/traditional versus evolving/agile/adaptive organizational and PMO approaches. You can check either one of the characteristics and add the number of your checks at the bottom to get a score that will highlight whether you lean more toward traditional/foundational or evolving/agile.

Figure 2.1 highlights the fundamentally different approaches to setting‐up and managing organizations, based on a mechanistic view of foundational or traditional aspects of standards, stability, and rigidity versus flexibility, agility, and responsiveness in the evolving, organic mindset. On the one hand, there is a need to establish rigor with a sound governance structure of methods and processes; on the other hand, there is a demand for freedom and flexibility. This is indeed a primal paradox between the need for discipline and freedom at the same time. This dilemma hounds the successful implementation of project management and PMO processes. It surfaces the underlying friction and challenges long‐questioned beliefs about control and the role of management. To bring about the discipline, you need the rigor of standards and processes. However, the rigor can turn into rigidity that restricts judgment and stifles creativity and tend to slow and restrain organizational agility and innovation.

The distinction also highlights false assumptions that are inherent that the right side is better than the traditional approaches of the left side, or vice versa. For example, start‐ups can move and pivot with speed and agility, or established companies have consistency and predictability. After a certain point, start‐ups struggle to maintain momentum, lose focus and become chaotic, while traditional companies become bureaucratic and rigid that hamper their ability to move. Traditionally, the purpose of PMOs is to implement standards and processes and are more skewed toward the left.

Another assumption is that executives have to make a trade‐off and choose between one or the other, speed and agility, or standards and stability. The classic mistake is to treat it as an “either/or” choice, instead of “and/both” thinking that can identify links between opposing forces and generate new ideas. To practice this, you have to understand integrative thinking and apply the power of paradoxical frames. Roger Martin, in his book The Opposable Mind, defines integrative thinking as “the ability to face constructively the tension of opposing ideas and, instead of choosing one at the expense of the other, generate a creative resolution of the tension in the form of a new idea that contains elements of the opposing ideas but is superior to each.” By acknowledging and combining the opposing elements, you temper the undesirable side effects of each element and enable new insights that integrate both elements.

Stanford professor Charles O'Reilly explains organizational ambidexterity as,

the ability of an organization to compete in mature markets and technologies—where key success factors involve efficiency, incremental improvement and short timeframes; and simultaneously, to compete in emerging markets and technologies—where key success factors require flexibility, initiative, risk‐taking and experimentation. Research indicates that the ability to do both of these at once is associated with long‐term success.

WHAT IS NEXT‐GENERATION PROJECT MANAGEMENT AND PMO?

Next‐generation project management and PMO is ambidextrous; it recognizes the importance of both the elements and does not focus on either/or. It acknowledges the tension between the paradoxical elements but understands that marrying the two reduces the undesirable effects of each and leads to new insights and blended solutions. For example, make sure everything is planned for the go‐live, but also remain flexible so that we can deal with last‐minute requests from customers. This is a classic paradox that stumbles traditional PMOs, who do not recognize how planning and flexibility can positively reinforce each other. Continuous planning can help you be better prepared for customer changes and enable greater flexibility.

The next‐generation PM and PMO is better prepared to deal with the DANCE and disruption because it pushes strategy execution to the edge, by constantly questioning, seeking, and learning. It learns how to juxtapose the opposing forces of the need for rigor and flexibility and use them to create a dynamic strategy execution environment. Next‐generation PM has to use a bimodal approach or barbell strategy. Nassim Taleb, in his book, Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder, describes the barbell strategy by explaining that the barbell is meant to illustrate the idea of a combination of extremes to describe a dual attitude of playing it safe in some areas and taking a lot of small risks in others. Extreme risk aversion on one side, and extreme risk loving on the other, thus reducing the downside risk of ruin, while capitalizing on the positive risks. You can't plan for the unpredictable, but you can build shock absorbers, and increase absorptive capacity, by embracing and capitalizing on the paradoxes.

Which Quadrant Is Your Organization in Today?

In Figure 2.2, the rigor versus responsiveness matrix lists the characteristics of each quadrant from the two extremes of bureaucratic and start‐up environments to the balanced next generation. Check each box that relates to your organization. Add the number of checks in each quadrant to determine where your company is today.

Rigidity can be defined by a heavy emphasis on formal structures and control, standard methods and processes, top‐down governance with dictated authority, responsibility, and decision making. You are expected to follow precisely defined rules and procedures rather than to use personal judgment. In contrast, responsiveness means the project management practices or the PMO is responsive to the stakeholder and business needs. It emphasizes flexibility, adaptable and customized processes, and self‐regulating governance with shared authority, responsibility, and decision making. A responsive PMO is tuned to the shifting business environment and can respond to changing priorities. For example, you may have worked hard to come up with a consistent project selection criteria model, but a responsive PMO would be open to adjusting and fine‐tuning the model rather than stubbornly proposing a one‐size‐fits‐all approach.

Typically, the idea of project management methodologies and PMOs conjures up images of bureaucracy and loads of unnecessary paperwork. In the Projectize Group survey referenced earlier, 72 percent of PMO stakeholders perceived their PMOs to be bureaucratic. Indeed, project management methodologies and PMO practices are often guilty of inflicting too much process, like requiring your project managers to complete two weeks of project documentation on a one‐week project. It is akin to installing an elaborate security system on a cookie jar with a detailed process for removing cookies to prevent your child from eating too much sugar.

The traditional notion of control and mandated compliance can be an illusion. You may think you are gaining control, but what you are getting is paperwork and bureaucracy, while project managers and team members seek ways to undermine the processes. They may fill out the forms and templates to the letter to get the PMO off their backs, but not necessarily with the right spirit. Whether you are trying to bring up your child in a disciplined environment or you are trying to implement the discipline of project management practices, you go through a similar struggle. To bring about the discipline, you need the rigor of standards and processes. However, the rigor can turn into rigidity that restricts agility.

How to Achieve Balance

3M did manage to regain its groove. In July 2005 a new CEO, George Buckley, was appointed. He worked to preserve the benefits of Six Sigma's cost‐cutting and efficiency‐improvement efforts while simultaneously re‐stimulating the creative and innovative juices at 3M. The way he managed to find the sweet spot was to exempt a lot of the research process from the more formal Six Sigma forms and reports. He found a way to balance by having process rigor where it made sense and toning it down in other areas. According to Buckley, “Invention is by its very nature a disorderly process …. You can't put a Six Sigma process into that area and say, well, I'm getting behind on invention, so I'm going to schedule myself for three good ideas on Wednesday and two on Friday. That's not how creativity works.” By 2010, 3M had restored its innovative edge, and since 2010 it has continuously made it to the top 10 in Strategy & PwC's top innovator's list.

The need for rigor and freedom are opposing forces that cause friction between the PMO and its stakeholders. You have to seek the balance between the extremes of rigidity and responsiveness to varying degrees, as illustrated in Figure 2.3.

The very purpose of implementing project management and PMOs is to achieve discipline. Either extreme, rigid processes or flexibility with no standards, is not desirable. It is imperative to optimize the balance between two forces inherently at cross purpose.

As Peter Drucker said, “Most of what we call management consists of making it difficult for people to get their work done.” The opportunity is to find the balance that makes the PMO responsive to the needs of the stakeholders, so it is easier for them to manage projects. For example, the PMO has to target the right mix of rules versus guidelines, instead of strictly defined “Ten Commandments,” the PMO may require “Four Commandments and Six Suggestions.”

HOW TO DESIGN EFFECTIVE BOUNDARIES

An oft‐used cliché is that managing people or stakeholders is like herding sheep; the challenge is, how do you corral the sheep in such a way that you steer them in the direction you want them to go effortlessly? The answer lies in how you design the field to your advantage by focusing on cultivating a conducive environment and tilting it to your advantage, so people comply because they want to and not because they are forced to. While implementing project management practices, the fences of processes and methods should be developed and raised collaboratively as much as possible. They should be permeable and flexible with built‐in mechanisms for feedback. And, of course, they should provide enough freedom for personal judgment, creativity, and innovation. The PMO should cultivate a culture where it is OK to bend but not break the rules to be agile.

SEVEN KEYS FOR EFFECTIVE PROJECT MANAGEMENT AND PMO FOCUS AND RESULTS

What are the themes across project management and PMOs that are thriving and perceived as valuable, delighting their stakeholders and making an impact? In our work with diverse organizations, from start‐ups to established companies, government organizations, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) around the world, we have observed and codified seven themes that are common. Successful PMOs use the following questions as keys to unlock the right doors that lead to success and better focus and adoption of project management and PMO:

1. Who is our customer? How do we better focus on the customer and business?
2. How do we define success? How do we measure what matters?
3. How can we be better prepared to deal with the DANCE and disruption?
4. How can we cultivate a culture of connection, community, and collaboration?
5. How can we develop and enhance overall change intelligence?
6. How do we learn better and adapt? How do we develop signature practices that give us a competitive edge?
7. How can we simplify and build a Department of Simplicity?

Remember, if you are not using all of these keys as questions, some of the doors may not open. You are either not aware of it or not focusing on the right things. All of the seven keys are important as you apply the DNA of strategy execution. We find that if even one of these keys is missing, PMOs and strategy‐execution offices (SEOs) can lose focus and implementation efforts can stumble.

Shaping the Future with Project Management and PMO

“By 2030, 25 percent of all transportation trips will be smart and driverless.”

“By 2030, 25 percent of buildings will be 3D printed.”

You might think that these bold statements are from one of the big Silicon Valley companies we hear about. Think again. These statements are from the government of Dubai, where they are constantly trying to find the sweet spot among the extremes. In my work and interactions with the PMO at the Roads and Traffic Authority (RTA) of Dubai, it has been an interesting journey to see how they try to balance and deliver on the bold goals, whether it is to fix the traffic problems in Dubai delivering on the goal of autonomous vehicles, or creating a roadmap for adopting 3D printing within the RTA.

Key	Door	Leads to …	How?
Customer and Business Focus: Who is our customer? How do we better focus on the customer and business? How do we become a steward of value and impact?	Customer and Business focus	Alignment of strategy execution, greater customer focus, understanding of what drives business, ownership, and accountability for results and outcomes	WITGBRFDT?—Start everything with the question What Is the Good Business Reason for Doing This? Understand your business model canvas Develop a business plan for your PMO Address how you can help run, grow, and transform the business Covered in Chapter 4
Measurement: How do we define success? How do we measure what matters?	Measurement	Selecting the right metrics and continually evaluating performance and results	Define what success is? Develop a strategy execution scorecard PMO delight index Covered in Chapter 8
Adaptive: How can we be better prepared to deal with the DANCE and disruption?	Adaptiveness and agility	Speed; responsiveness; agility; rigor without rigidity	Not Either/Or, but AND; Ambidextrous Utilizing paradoxical frames; finding your sweet spot between rigidity and responsiveness Covered in this chapter
Connection and Collaboration: How can we break the barriers and cultivate a culture of connection, collaboration, speed, and agility?	Connection, community, and collaboration	Flatter structures, engagement, and excitement, ownership, and accountability, self‐regulated governance, voluntary compliance, greater adoption	Cultivate a sandbox or studio; emulating the positive characteristics of lean start‐up cultures Covered in Chapter 7
Change: How can we develop and enhance overall change intelligence?	Change‐making	Greater change‐readiness; increased change absorption and adoption capacity	Develop organizational, psychological, and emotional change intelligence Covered in Chapter 9
Learning: How do we cultivate a learning environment? How do we learn better and adapt? How do we develop signature practices that give us a competitive edge?	Learning	Culture of failing fast, learning from failure, refrain from blind adoption of best practices; adoption of appropriate and useful practices	Rethinking best practices, cultivating signature practices Covered in Chapter 10
Simplicity: How can we simplify and build a Department of Simplicity?	Simplicity	Elegance and simplicity; greater buy‐in, acceptance, and adaptability of processes, methods, and tools	Build a Department of Simplicity Covered in Chapter 11

I have seen the PMO evolve from a few project managers to an enterprise‐level PMO, placed with the director general's office recognizing its importance and impact. With numerous mega projects at the cutting edge of technology, from autonomous vehicles to getting ready for future technologies like hyper‐oop, it can be a challenge to find the balance between rigor and rigidity. As the director of the PMO shared, “It is not easy, but we have learned to focus on what needs to get accomplished, and shape the boundaries to get it accomplished, and leave the project teams to figure out the how.”

With the push toward the idea of Dubai 10X, symbolizing experimental, out‐of‐the‐box future‐oriented exponential thinking in projects, they are exemplary in how they have learned to thrive on the edge in a DANCE‐world. The way they strive for agility is by rating themselves on a future fitness indicator, which rates foresight—the depth of future envisioning opportunities, solutions, or threats and readiness with optimal processes, or rigid adherence to strategies and processes that threatens, versus reaction speed—measuring the reaction toward the opportunity or threat, as illustrated in Figure 2.4.

Project management and the PMO is having an impact not only within government but also in the region as they have sponsored an annual Dubai International Project Management Forum since 2014, and recently they instituted an award for innovation in project management.

How can you get project management and PMO fit for the future, with the right foresight and reaction time? That is what the rest of the book is about. The next chapter decodes the DNA of strategy execution.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• Traditional project management and PMO processes are about consistency and control and are designed to work well in a mechanical world, whereas the DANCE and disruption are characteristic of difference, failure, disorder, learning, and mutation.
• Standards, processes, and structures can be beneficial, but the challenge is knowing how much is right for your organization and business. Failure stems from either too much or too little governance and process. The challenge is to thrive. You need to find your sweet spot between the two extremes.
• The next generation depends on questions. In the past, we relied on answers, but in today's world as the DANCE intensifies and uncertainty increases, the value of questions goes up, and the value of answers goes down. Project/program managers and PMOs should learn to ask better questions and seek new perspectives to connect different aspects of the DNA of strategy execution.
• On the one hand, there is a need to establish rigor with a sound governance structure of methods and processes. On the other hand, there is a demand for freedom and flexibility. This is indeed a primal paradox between the need for discipline and freedom at the same time.
• Next‐generation project management and PMO is ambidextrous. It recognizes the importance of both the elements and does not focus on either/or. It acknowledges the tension between the paradoxical elements but understands that marrying the two reduces the undesirable effects of each and leads to new insights and blended solutions.
• True agility is achieved by aiming for rigor without rigidity. Balance foundational stability with dynamic agility. Strive to provide freedom with fences. Use ideas of fair process, community and collaboration, self‐regulation, scalability, self‐elimination, and desire paths to find and fine‐tune your sweet spot.