In the rapidly evolving world of project management, methodologies such as Agile and Waterfall have long dominated the discourse. However, the integration of behavioral science into project management practices is carving out a new frontier, promising more effective and human-centered methodologies.
Galen Low is joined by Dr. Josh Ramirez—CEO of The Institute for Neuro & Behavioral Project Management—to talk about the role of behavioral science in project management, how it impacts our beloved project methodologies, and why it could become an important part of the future of project management.
In the rapidly evolving world of project management, methodologies such as Agile and Waterfall have long dominated the discourse. However, the integration of behavioral science into project management practices is carving out a new frontier, promising more effective and human-centered methodologies.
Galen Low is joined by Dr. Josh Ramirez—CEO of The Institute for Neuro & Behavioral Project Management—to talk about the role of behavioral science in project management, how it impacts our beloved project methodologies, and why it could become an important part of the future of project management.
Hey folks, thanks for tuning in. My name is Galen Low with the Digital Project Manager. We are a community of digital professionals on a mission to help each other get skilled, get confident, and get connected so that we can amplify the value of project management in a digital world. If you wanna hear more about that, head on over to thedigitalprojectmanager.com/membership. Okay, today we're talking about the role of behavioral science in project management, how it impacts our beloved project methodologies, and why it could become an important part of the future of project management. Joining me today is Dr. Josh Ramirez, the CEO of The Institute for Neuro& Behavioral Project Management. Josh, thanks for joining me today.
Josh Ramirez:Thanks so much for the invitation. This is going to be fun.
Galen Low:I think it's going to be amazing. So Josh and I, we've been gabbing before recording this and just this notion of behavioral project management, I think really piqued my interest. I thought, you know, our listeners are going to really eat this up. If nothing else, it's going to spin up a debate. So I'm really excited to get into it. I guess first of all, like, it's kind of an interesting combination, and I'm wondering if maybe you could share the same origin story you shared with me when we were prepping for this, of like, how you got into project management, and then how you got from project management into pursuing your doctorate in behavioral science, and then also what that formed and how that formed the Institute for Neuro& Behavioral Project Management.
Josh Ramirez:Yeah, so it was a really interesting story because I was in project management, mostly in Department of Energy, mega projects, et cetera, project controls. It's a lot of cost and schedule, right? And my friend, Dr. Jodi Wilson, who I had known, she was a behavioral scientist. And so I would see all these things like, you know, people are planning optimistically, we're always behind schedule, and I was trying to figure it out, and I would ask Jodi, I'd be like, you know, what's going on here? Is this like a human behavior thing or something? And she would kind of point to her head and say, do they have one of these? You know, referring to, do you have a brain? Right? And I'd say, well, I guess they do, you know? She's like, well, then it's a behavioral problem, right? So everything's a behavioral problem. For the most part. But yeah, so she'd give me some words. She'd be like, you know, have you heard of cognitive biases? I was like, I don't know. And then she'd give me a couple. I'd go look them up on Wikipedia and I'd just do some mad searching and find things like, oh, the planning fallacy. That's a cognitive bias that explains the tendency to underestimate durations. I'm like, what? This is all the stuff I was looking for, right? So I'd dig a little bit deeper. And so I'd ask her more questions. And I was considering a PhD at the time. And I didn't know which direction to go and she's like, well, have you considered this program at the Chicago School of Professional Psychology? And I looked at it and I was like, this is it, right? This is what I was looking for. And so essentially my dissertation ended up being studying the integration of behavioral science with project management. So my dissertation is titled Toward a Theory of Behavioral Project Management. And so, you go a little bit further on that, I was on a plane ride for our first time on a family vacation to Hawaii, and I was studying my behavioral economics class, and then it hit me. Behavioral economics. They integrated behavioral science with economics to create behavioral economics. And I'm trying to figure out what this thing is between behavioral science and project management, and I'm like, Is there a behavioral project management already? And I was like, it was like two or three more hours before we landed and I'm just like sitting there without internet access thinking, Oh, like I have to check, right? Like, as soon as I land, is this a thing? So it was a nerve wracking couple hours. I landed. First thing I did was Google it. There was no behavioral project management. And I'm like, face palm. Are you serious? So, that essentially led to my paper, or my dissertation for my PhD, Toward a Theory of Behavioral Project Management, founding the Institute for Neuro & Behavioral Project Management, and then creating our certification course, which is called NeuralPlan. So, it just kind of all came together. Jodi was at the very beginning of that. She essentially introduced me to the topic that led to us developing this discipline.
Galen Low:I love that story, and I love how, you know, somehow the best ideas always happen when you're dreaming in the shower or on an airplane, where you can't really do anything about it, other than like, maybe scribble it on a napkin. No, it's incredible. I mean, like, what year is this? What year did you found the Institute?
Josh Ramirez:So we founded the Institute in 2018. I started my research in 2016.
Galen Low:Nice, okay. Yeah, it's like, it's such interesting timing and framing because you know, I think it's around that time, and even still now, it's still sort of progressing this sort of appreciation of the human element in project management, not all these processes and inputs and outputs necessarily. Those are all important too, but usually the problems you run into aren't really necessarily, you know, above that document you created. That's probably pristine and perfect. You know, it's the humans that mess it up. And I say that kindly.
Josh Ramirez:You know, and you say talk about methodologies and we'll get into it in a minute, but just to kind of bring it into the picture, it's about designing project management around the brain. So, sometimes it just means your methodologies are updated to account for that.
Galen Low:I wonder if maybe you could kind of give us a few examples of like what behavioral project management entails for you. And maybe even just like some places where it's being practiced today, you know, with help from the Institute.
Josh Ramirez:It is an emerging discipline. So we've got, I would say in terms of practicing, you know, we've had a few pilot studies out there that I've done. A big one was in department of energy where we got about an 80% improvement in planning, reliability, and essentially meeting milestones more. Of course, we have our neuro plan practitioners out there who are certified and practicing, and so they're starting to develop their own models as well. But yeah, so, when we think of project management, we think of, you know, like old school project management from Waterfall would be like, you know, you have initiating phase, planning, executing, monitor, control, close. But from a behavioral standpoint, we look at it from where can you design around the brain, and so we've got more like modalities of behavioral PM. So, right now, from what we see, there are four major ones, which are processes, interfaces, such as software, metrics and skills. And so typically when we think of behavioral science, we would think, oh, it's kind of like sit on the couch and tell me how you feel type deal, right? Emotional intelligence, good communication. Yeah, that's all part of behavioral science too, but that's like maybe 20% of it. The other part of that is you can use behavioral science to essentially design your processes. So when I say the four modalities of behavioral PM - processes, interfaces, metrics, and skills. Typically, when we think of behavioral science, we only think of it in the skills category, right? Like teach me how to be a better leader or teach me how to, you know, communicate better or de bias myself, for example. Okay, that's great. That's just the skills portion. What about your software? You can design your processes and your software that are more centered around human behavior to account for human behavior and thinking errors. For example, you can change your metrics. You can design your procedures and your processes to take certain steps. Right? That you would maybe not have had in there otherwise, but behavioral science has shown you that you need this additional step to get more reliability. So it's a very broad range. I mean, there's nudging, there's choice architecture. All the things that maybe some people have heard of before, you can plug that in, in various modalities.
Galen Low:I love that. I'm going to get you to give some examples in a little bit, but what I'm really interested in is that, you know, coming into this, I was thinking, I'm like, okay, is behavioral project management going to, you know, be this new methodology? You know, is it going to try and get, you know, in the ring with the sort of Waterfall/Agile, you know, debate? Or is it something different? Is it like a philosophy or a framework? But like, I love that you use the word design, especially when you said process design. I'm like, Oh yeah, it's like, I don't know, in my head, I'm thinking it's another layer. It's like another step. You could be using whatever approach, whatever methodology, but when it comes down to really detailing how the product's going to go, how these processes are going to go, how we're interfacing with software, like what that experience is like. That's when we layer in the sort of the behavioral side of things.
Josh Ramirez:Right. We say behavioral PM isn't going to replace Waterfall. It's not going to replace Agile. Essentially what it's going to do is embed behavioral science in every methodology. Because humans, we are humans. We have human behavior. We have cognition, thinking. And so essentially every methodology that we use, there is a human involved. So essentially a behavioral PM becomes the foundation upon which other technical disciplines can continue to build. Because many things that are common to all humans will be common throughout all methodologies. So Behavioral PM is not one of those things you could say, Well, okay, now I'm going to stop using Agile because I've adopted Behavioral PM. No, you're actually going to use Behavioral PM with all of those methodologies, and eventually they will be embedded in all those methodologies. And I'll give you an example, Behavioral Economics, because, you know, Behavioral Economics has been around for, you know, a couple of decades. And essentially what they did is when they inserted behavioral science into the technical discipline of economics, what they found is that it called into question many traditional theories in economics. Because economics essentially just assumed that all beings were just rational and, you know, perfect decision makers, right? So in behavioral economics, they call that fictitional person homo economicus, which is essentially means, you know, it's this person that doesn't exist that makes perfect decisions. And so when you insert behavioral science into it, what you find is that it upends many of the traditional technical theories that we assumed. It'll do the same thing with project management, and it'll enable us to essentially kind of clean up some of the complication. Behavioral science, you think, well, we're going to adopt this new discipline, it's going to make it more complex. Actually, as a cognitive scientist, I'm going to tell you, our idea is actually to make things more simple because that enables the brain to process better.
Galen Low:In my head, I'm thinking, I'm like, okay, well, throughout all of this, like, how much is actually up to the project manager in this scenario? I think a lot of our listeners might be like, okay, well, I'm not gonna like, start from scratch and rewrite every process for every project to account for human behavior differently. Is this something where, you know, like, the sort of neural PMs and the folks that you certify and folks just practicing this, like, is that what they're doing? Are they going, okay, well, listen, I need to redesign a project process with humans in mind. And I'll use these guiding principles, but fundamentally it's another sort of stream of work that I need to do to make sure my project goes well. Or is it maybe, you know, more collaborative or bigger than just the responsibility of the project manager?
Josh Ramirez:Yeah, it's definitely bigger than the responsibility of just the PM. Matter of fact, I think one of the biggest places that we'll probably see the first changes will be in the PMO. Another name for that is what we're calling is more of a behavioral PMO. So it's like the PMO is where you would probably start. It's essentially that's where you start to kind of roll out some of those changes, right? And sometimes it's completely up to the organization itself outside of the control of the PM in terms of designing that cognitive environment. So for example, time pressure causes us to think more automatically. We already think automatically 95% of the day. And that causes the brain to go what behavioral scientists call System 1, which is, if you ever read the book Thinking Fast and Slow, that's that same concept. So essentially, when we're under time pressure, we think faster, and when we think faster, we're not thinking as thoroughly. And so what that does is it causes us to use the brain's heuristic system, which makes us default certain directions. Sometimes those directions are not good, right? For example, we may default to the most obvious answer or we default to something that can quickly come to mind. So that would be more heuristic based. And when we default to those, we actually rely on more cognitive biases to do our decision making and project management. So by default, in a sense, if you look at project management and its definition, it's a temporary endeavor to deliver a product or service. Temporary endeavor creates time pressure. Time pressure creates System 1. System 1 causes potential more thinking errors. And that essentially increases your risk and causes schedule delays and cost overruns. So, back to how the organization can control that, is the organization can control time pressure. The organization can control cognitive load or psychological safety. So, it's not just in the PM's hands.
Galen Low:That's fair. No, and I like that in terms of like, the overarching, you know, body or centralized project management, you know, office or whatever you call it at your organization. I wonder, maybe you can walk through an example, because I like that idea, and I know I've been in projects where, you know, we kind of recognize that. We're like, good enough, right? We'll say things like, okay, yeah, you know, good enough for this, good enough for that. We're going, you know, we're using the sort of fast think heuristics view of the world. We're probably leveraging on, you know, unconscious bias, maybe conscious bias. We're kind of shortcutting our way through. And then when I like rewind, I'm like, I think that's what a lot of project managers, myself included, kind of think our job is, right? Is like, we have time pressure and we have to manage time pressure. Time pressure is almost a constant. It's going to exist. And yet, you know, what does a world look like where we allow our teams to not work under this sort of time pressure? What does that look like and how does it work?
Josh Ramirez:I think in terms of time pressure, what you have to realize is it's where you're using time pressure and the level of time pressure. Some time pressure is okay. Extreme time pressure is going to give you more defaulted thinking, right? So it's not only how much time pressure, but when. So if you're doing things that require a lot of predictability, so for example, if you're talking anything predictive such as creating a plan, which is predictive. If you are doing risk identification, that's predictive, right? If you're doing resource estimation, also predicted. Those are predictive things. Anytime you do anything predictive, you should be reducing time pressure specifically in those areas. If you're just looking at monitoring, controlling, and you're just, you know, getting feedback and creating reports, maybe time pressure can be a little higher than because it's more redacted and it is predictive. But if you're doing anything predictive, time pressure should be lower than because essentially that's when you become more defaulted in your thinking.
Galen Low:I remember and I wish I had this conversation with you like 12 years ago because we, you know, I've worked on a couple of projects where, you know, there's a lot of technical complexity or ambiguity. We don't really know what the solution is or, you know, in service design where, you know, we want to do the research and take the time to find the right, you know, solution. We're going through this, like, double diamond design thinking process kind of thing, right? Where, you know, as a project manager, I'm like, okay, well, is two weeks enough for that? And they're like, well, I don't know how long is enough to solve a problem that has never been solved before. And it was really difficult to sell through like, oh, we're going to do a month of R&D. And yeah, our clients would be like, what, what do you mean? Like, can't you just like, don't you just know how to do this? And I would have loved to have had that argument up my sleeve to be like, well, you know, we can think fast, you know, and rely on our assumptions and produce the wrong thing. Or we can, you know, reduce the time pressure, you know, take the time, do the slow thinking, like remove some of our biases and come up with a better result because this has never been done before. Like, I think that would actually land, you know, not for every client. I think a lot of our listeners will be like, yeah, my client would just be like, just do it, do it in a week. But I like the argument of like, it's going to be better because this is how our brain works. Not because we have more time to sit around and have a Don Draper nap and think about it, that too. But also, our brain is in a different mode. Like, we are thinking about it a different way. That's the benefit.
Josh Ramirez:Yeah and, you know, there's often some assumptions like, and this is where the biased thinking comes in. Yeah, but I think better under time pressure, right? Sure, okay. If you want to believe that, yep. Or, all I need is a couple good cups of coffee and that's going to reduce my cognitive load. Sorry, that brain doesn't work that way, you know? And so, if you realize that a lot of these things are common to all human beings, that there's neuroscience behind a lot of it as well, then you can kind of learn to accept that, hey, you know, we all kind of have these same kind of brain functions, and so we all have to account for them, there's none of us that are special. What makes us more special and skilled in that area is knowing how it affects us so that we can calibrate that.
Galen Low:I just like the thematic tie as well because, I mean, especially project managers, right? Like, you know, we're talking about, you know, "old" school models of project management. And not that long ago, right, a lot of project managers thought their role was to just get it done on time, right? Like, so, if you can get it done fast, then that's good. And more and more we're realizing that, you know, our role is actually to, you know, a) manage a team of humans that probably don't always work together. So, I can see how behavioral science could be handy there. But also we're responsible for delivering value. So thinking fast and getting it done and checking something off of the list doesn't mean good enough anymore. Before I could say, yeah, I got it done on time and I'm a project manager and that's all that really matters. It's under budget or is on budget. We didn't do anything extra, no gold plating, like it's perfect. But if it's the wrong thing and we didn't take the time to actually create the environment for someone to come up with a better solution, then is that really success? And that's what I like about sort of the, you know, the behavioral science lens to all of this.
Josh Ramirez:Oh, yeah. And, you know, and kind of echoing some of that on another pilot study I did, I found about 65% of our schedule delays were actually predictable and preventable. And just to pull the string on one of those, what I found is in some cases, that predictable event that we misforecasted essentially had waste inside of it. So for example, Team A is on location and doing their thing. Team B forecasted that next week they're going to be at that same location. Except they didn't bother to pick up the phone to see if Team A was going to be in the spot where they needed to be. Team B then shows up where Team A is working and can't work. Where's the waste? Well, the waste is in now Team B has to redeploy to another project because this is the one they had planned. If they can redeploy to another project, assume it takes them, you know, another day before they can start another project. Essentially, you've got my particular example, six guys and gals who show up at you say a burdened rate of a hundred bucks an hour, right? And they're going to have an eight hour day. Essentially, you just wasted, you know, five grand in downtime because you made a bad prediction. So planning isn't just essentially anything predictive. Anytime you're making a prediction is planning, whether you're predicting what you will do tomorrow, predicting what you do a month from now. And there's waste involved with not thinking and using that de biasing technique to predict and plan your work. Because planning is really predictive coordination, right? We're predictively coordinating where things need to be by a particular time. And so good planning and good prediction essentially goes back to the brain. Because the brain is essentially doing imagination in order to imagine what we will do tomorrow, for example. Because you're not actually doing it, there's nothing physical to represent it. So it's all mental processing. Planning is essentially an exercise in imagination. And so any weaknesses of the brain essentially become a weakness in prediction. And that causes waste and cost overrun, and of course, schedule delays and risk.
Galen Low:So maybe talk to me about some of the fixes. You had mentioned a couple of things earlier and in our previous conversations. The two that I latched onto were nudging and I think what you called obstacle identification. And I'm wondering if we could sort of apply this to planning and time pressure, especially that scenario of like, you know, if only we had done X or Y, this team wouldn't have just, you know, been sitting on their hands all day, and we'd have Scythe Grand in our pocket.
Josh Ramirez:So, obstacle identification. So, there's research and planning on the behavioral side that shows that when you identify obstacles to the task or activity completion prior to, this is the key because of the anchoring effect bias. Prior to making an estimate of resources or estimate of time, then the reliability of your plan goes up. In other words, you will deliver more on what you said you would do. So the key there is you're kind of forcing the brain to look at what gets in the way of completing this work. And the key is doing it prior to actually starting it, right? Because once you start it now, you're gonna run into the obstacles versus, you know, getting a chance to deal with them in advance. But there's little kind of tricks in behavioral science in some cases. Things that are kind of really subtle and they seem mundane, but because we don't use them, we're not as effective, right? And so this also goes back to the kind of project science evidence based side of project management, which is we're not using a lot of evidence based studies to develop our project management methodologies. So if you look at something like obstacle identification, essentially what the study found is that you've got more reliable execution by identifying obstacles prior to estimating anything. And it's really kind of common sense when you think about it, except for if we're not doing it, then we're not getting the results, right? And then so you'd mentioned nudging or choice architecture, also very subtle. So, for example, they did a study in, I forget which country it was, but essentially what they were looking at was how do we increase organ donation. And what they found is that they changed the defaults in terms of when people would, you know, sign up to get their license or whatever they would do, they would change the defaults in the program from opting in to opting out. So, I have to take an extra step in order to opt out, which, that interferes with our human inertia, and we don't like taking extra steps. So we still give them the choice, but it's the defaults that have been switched. So essentially what they did is when they switched it from, I have to opt in to organ donation to I have to opt out of organ donation. The organ donation just went through the roof. I mean, it was just like crazy increase. And it's like, well, you know, you could have left it at opt in, but spend all this extra energy marketing, begging people to opt in, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah. And all we need to do is just make a default switch, right? And that's just one example of nudging. So if you combine all these different types of behavioral strategies into project management, what you get is you get defaulted better decision making in the end.
Galen Low:Let me play it back to you and see if I'm understanding this correctly, because in some ways, obstacle identification, like I'm thinking of it as similar to risk management, I guess, right? Like, we could go wrong, we could go terribly right, I guess, but I think in some ways risk management has a bad rap because, you know, as soon as you say it, you know, across multiple industries, it's not anyone's favorite thing necessarily, right? Oh, we're going to do risk identification. Boring. Like this sounds terrible and cynical, but you know, using your sort of nudging example, it kind of reframing a question to make it easier. You know, I'm thinking about things like, you know, the question of when do you think you could get this done by? Which is a common thing to ask when we're planning, we're estimating, right? Which is a very pressurized question, right? Which is like, when everyone throws up their hands and say, you know, estimation is a joke, humans suck at planning, yadda yadda yadda, all those things are probably actually true. But you know, versus the question of, I don't know, like, what might prevent you from getting this done, you know, in the best way possible? What has to go right, I guess, in order for this to give you the best probability of succeeding at delivering this thing. Is that kind of the right idea in terms of, like, a nudge that's framed differently and an exercise in, like, obstacle identification so that we can just kind of, you know, unpack differently and maybe just use the parts of our brain that are a bit more imaginative and creative instead of the, you know, the fast brain that's just, you know, let's get this estimate done because we need to get out the door and it's going to be terrible anyways.
Josh Ramirez:So, yeah, obstacle identification is one of those easy ones, because essentially what you're doing is kind of forcing the brain to look at things from different perspectives. But obstacle identification is also different from risk from a human behavior perspective. And so I often get the question, you know, why would I start identifying obstacles when I already do risk? Well, two reasons. But one of the big reasons is that the brain looks at risk different than it looks at obstacles. Because risk, in many cases, is essentially this bad thing that may or may not occur. Obstacles are one of those things I have to overcome and it's something that will occur. Obstacles do occur. Risks may or may not occur. How is that different for the brain? Well, to the brain, something bad that may or may not occur, I can assign a low probability to or just strike it from the risk register because it's mentally uncomfortable. If I say it may or may not occur, my brain to deal with the cognitive dissonance, as we call it, may say, eh, you know, I just really think that there's not a high probability of it happening. You know why? Because I want to reduce the mental discomfort associated with that risk. And so risk is essentially giving me an opt out opportunity. An opportunity to say, that risk is not that important. Low probability or I'm just going to strike it from the risk register. If I ask you to identify obstacles, those are things that will occur. I do have to overcome them, and sometimes it can even, you know, there's a little bit of gamification in there as well. Obstacle identification, it's like, well, you know, I have the opportunity to essentially solve this problem. So, there is a big difference between risk and obstacles. You still need to identify risk. I'm not saying you shouldn't. I'm just saying that identifying obstacles is different.
Galen Low:Oh, I'm glad you clarified that, because, you know, in my head I was like, obstacles, you can kind of walk around, you know, I'm picturing this like, obstacle course, one of those ridiculous game shows. You know, you're just like, I'll just walk around it, but actually, this is the course. You have to go through these things, and they're like, you know, going through the different, various, whatever, levels, like it's the process, and actually it kind of gives credit to the process, too. Not, what's going to go wrong that keeps you from doing, you know, the thing that's just your job. Versus saying, like, okay, your job is tough, like, tell me about, like, what obstacles, like, what hard steps do you need to cross in order to get this done, so that we can understand better, and actually probably inform the risk management process as well to be like, okay, all the ambiguous stuff that we don't know, yeah, that, those are risks. But the stuff that we do know, like, we'll treat them as obstacles because, you know, the job you're doing is difficult, is specialized, is, you know, multi step. It's multi faceted. It's not, you know, drawing a straight line with a pencil on a piece of paper. There's some complexity to it. And it kind of addresses that. And I guess it is like, you know, the opt in model.
Josh Ramirez:Yeah. And you can create activities for those obstacles too. I mean, if there's a major obstacle, you create an activity to overcome it. You know, so there's options.
Galen Low:I like this. Yeah. In my framing, in my understanding, it's kind of like, yeah, there's a layer of sort of, you know, process design doesn't give it enough credit, I guess. But to your point, when people think of behavioral science and project management, often they think about, you know, this like, traditionally what people might call "soft" skills, sit on the couch, talk about our feelings, but not necessarily, you know, getting the work done. But actually, this is different. This is actually designing a process with the human brain in mind, knowing what the human brain is actually quite bad at and finding ways to hack it for lack of a better word into better planning, better predictability and just overall less cognitive dissonance with the humans that are trying to get the project done. You mentioned software and like interfacing earlier. And just to kind of give that some context, I had a guest on the podcast a couple of years back, Bentzy Goldman, check out that episode. Pretty good. And it was kind of about that. It was nudges around kind of like a feedback and giving people an opportunity. I'm framing the question in a right way that it wasn't necessarily loaded to sort of embed that into the software experience, right? You're like managing your project or you're managing your work and these things will just kind of like layer in and pop up at the right times. In some cases in a way that is more relaxed rather than, you know, very time pressure oriented. But like is that something that your institute does is looking into in terms of layering onto software so that this is actually kind of like out of the box, you know, project managers might not have to worry about this that much. They might want to understand it, but they might not have to design all the nudges and design all the processes themselves.
Josh Ramirez:Yes, a matter of fact, we're starting to work with a software company right now, which is looking into that very process, which is essentially, how do we take behavioral science and behavioral PM and plug that into software development? Because every step along the way, you can change defaults, you can add processes, like, for example, obstacle identification, combine that with AI and prompts, and there's all kinds of stuff you can do, right? And so, if you look at just the example of the pilot study that I did where we essentially improved planning accuracy and the reliability of meeting that milestone, you're taking those same steps, and essentially you're just plugging them into the software versus, you know, the person has to be in the meeting, coaching, and through that, software essentially becomes the coach. And the nice thing about a lot of this is, although awareness of cognitive biases and thinking errors, etc. is important, that's part of the process. Like, if I teach you about optimism bias, you're likely to, you know, try to account for that in many cases. Because your brain's just got, now that it knows about it. So awareness is a good piece. And you should always have the awareness piece as well. But there's also the other part of it, which is just pure design, which is I'm just designing steps into the software or into your procedures, which cause you to make better decisions, right? So it's kind of a multifaceted approach. But the nice thing about the one experiment I did is I didn't do any teaching about biases. All I did was use behavioral design. And so I still got good results by essentially designing better decision making into the steps without having to train them on what cognitive biases were going on. Right? So there's many ways to approach it.
Galen Low:I love that layering. And I think, you know, probably our listeners are thinking that too. Like, how do I get started? Yes, probably awareness of biases and just reading up on behavioral science overall. You know, maybe lensing behavioral economics through a project management lens and kind of understanding what that means. But I like the idea as well that a process that's designed well does not rely on everyone having the same level of understanding or awareness of the science behind it. They just kind of like get to experience it, live it, and the impact is still going to be the same without like this huge learning curve.
Josh Ramirez:So obviously you're going to be much better if you have both the awareness component and the design component. But it's not like you have to get started by knowing everything.
Galen Low:Fair enough. I thought maybe I'd dive into some tough stuff. Some of the tough questions. Those are the softballs. No, I think you gave really good context. I think it's really interesting.
Josh Ramirez:Wait, I think we have a phone call coming in.
Galen Low:The line's breaking up. Toooot! You know, I mentioned earlier just the fact that project managers we've been debating things like Waterfall versus Agile for like over 20 years. We're not exactly like, the group of people that's like the most open to change, or if we are, it's very hard for us to agree on things. I like this idea of behavioral project management, but I'm wondering, like, could it become equally as, like, divisive? Like, and if so, what are the implications of behavioral project management being, like, adopted and practiced?
Josh Ramirez:Yeah, so, I don't think that it will become more divisive because essentially, what we're doing compared to some of the older methodologies, which were less evidence based. Although I have to caveat that by saying Agile does have a whole lot more evidence based stuff and it's a kudos to them. But I think part of the reason why we have these arguments all the time, one is time pressure causes automatic thinking, which causes more of that. But two is because a lot of methods are evidence based. So essentially, in many cases, we haven't found what's most effective. We're just kind of guessing at it sometimes. And so when you're guessing at it, then it becomes more a fight of opinions. But if you're using things that are kind of more and I say proven very lively because as behavioral scientists, we hate using that word. But I would say more evidence based, right? You've got more evidence that something worked because you tested it. And so when you bring in more science backed processes, there's less room to debate if they work, right? And so that I think kind of reduces some of the potential in terms of well, you know, which method is better blah blah blah. And I'm going to say well, if you use obstacle identification, it's going to work in Agile or Waterfall and you're going to find more obstacles. Like, I don't know what else to tell you. I mean, right, you know, it's simple things like that. You know, if you change your defaults, you're going to get results. If you do unpacking, which is proven in cognitive science, not only beneficial for planning and risk, but also for safety and personal decision making. You add in all those kind of components, a lot of them are just kind of like, yeah, I mean, there's really nothing to argue about there.
Galen Low:Fair enough. And actually, you know, even coming back to your story at the beginning with Jodi, right? It's like a lot of the arguments are around the idea that, projects are, you know, special snowflakes. They're all unique. And actually, you know, they are, but.
Josh Ramirez:There's a uniqueness bias for that, too, by the way. But go ahead.
Galen Low:Ooh, okay. I want to hear more about that. But I mean, the thing that you said, that Jodi had said to you, which is that, well, the common denominator is that these are people with brains doing a thing together. So, I mean, that part is not unique. That part is pretty much constant throughout our projects, at least for now, until the robots catch up. Right now we're dealing with human brains, human behavior. Doesn't matter what methodology you're using, some of the problems you run into aren't because of the methodology at all. And then we have all of these fights over anecdotal "evidence". Well, I saw another company do that and it failed. It fell on its face. Agile sucks. Like it's not going to work. Waterfall sucks. It doesn't work for us. Yeah. It's like, we might actually be arguing about the wrong thing, actually. We could be agreeing on the fact that humans are the ones that we need to kind of account for a little bit more.
Josh Ramirez:Yeah, like, yeah, here's a perfect example. In the federal projects environment, what you find is there's a lot of earned value compliance measures and earned value compliance has in it buried a lot of stuff that become counterproductive to good decision making. But why did earned value compliance become so popular? Or, since then, it's not popular. Why it becomes so used and regulated and the idea is that, well, I just need to have everything. I need to be able to see everything and monitor everything. And it's like, well, I understand that, but you're going to just such a level of depth that you're causing cognitive load. You're causing bad planning. You're not using visualizations as much, et cetera. Right? And so you find that, well, we threw in the whole toolbox, hoping that something would work. But what you found out was that you didn't need a thousand tools from the toolbox. You needed one three eighths inch socket. Right? And so the evidence based stuff essentially points you to get the right tool from the right job.
Galen Low:That's fair. Yeah. So this is the one, because I'm thinking about, you know, just like, yeah, the culture of earned value, especially in like, you know, you mentioned government, like public sector, and it's kind of like this sort of scrutiny around taxpayer dollars, and we want to make sure that no one's gaming the system. Which then causes people to game the system, right? It's like, there's a human brain for you. It's like, okay, you gave me a set of rules. Let me see how I can bend them. I mentioned earlier about just software, but also, you know, AI and how generative AI and LLMs are kind of, you know, coming into the forefront. And we're talking about that a lot, you know, in project management. Arguably, there's someone who might come in and say, Well, listen, like, that's all fine, Josh, but, you know, isn't it more important that we understand technology more than we understand some of this human behavior stuff? Because, you know, fundamentally, they're going to be sort of making the decisions and doing a lot of these things themselves. You know, why should we bother designing these processes for the human brain? Like, what would you say to that?
Josh Ramirez:Ooh, that's a deep one. I got a lot on that one. So first of all, as AI comes into the picture, AI will start handling more of the mundane tasks, right? What does that leave PMs with? More decision making. So instead of doing less decision making because of AI, they're doing more decision making, right? Because now AI is handling all the mundane tasks. What does that leave me with? I don't handle as much of the mundane tasks, so I can't run on System 1 as much as I used to. Now I'm forced to think in System 2, which is more deliberate and thoughtful. Which means what? I have to have more behavioral strategies to essentially clear my thinking up. So actually, with AI coming into the picture, we need behavioral science more, not less. Also, AI will have to eventually, and some of it's already being done, be have to be designed around the brain and de biasing. And when I say biasing, I'm not talking stereotypes or prejudice. I'm talking about just plain thinking errors like the planning fallacy, which is the tendency to underestimate durations, right? So, essentially, with AI coming to the picture, behavioral science becomes actually pretty much center to everything. Because if AI can handle some of the mundane project management tasks, now it's up to us as decision makers to use clear thinking. The other thing is if you look at ChatGPT, for example, as a simple example, or any generative AI where you're doing prompting, your prompt and how you ask the question will essentially get better or worse answers from the generative AI. So if I'm asking generative AI to unpack my tasks, that's the right ask, and I'm going to get better results. If I ask them to identify obstacles, I'm going to get better results from the AI, right? And also, AI can become a coach eventually in the future, where AI is essentially looking at the rest of our systems or past projects, and it says, what about this, right? And so it's pulling up this reference class forecast, which says, well, in the past, you've benchmarked and done the X in a certain amount of time. What say you, human, right? And so in which case now the human has to have a better thinking skills to essentially, for lack of a better word, converse with the AI and get better decisions, right? Because now they're going to be presented with a scenario in which case, once again, they have to make an unbiased decision. So if there's cognitive dissonance associated with that, which is mental discomfort associated with conflicting values or beliefs, that's a mentally uncomfortable thing. I don't want to talk about it, right? But AI is bringing you something that you have to face. How are you going to deal with it? The other thing is that AI can help in reframing, and so reframing is a big thing in behavioral science because, and I tried it in ChatGPT, I said, give me a list of risks for this associated work. It gave me a list of risks. How did AI give me the list of risks? Well, it gave it to me in kind of a scary sort of, you know, here's all the things that could go wrong. And I said, Hey ChatGPT, reframe that entire risk list that you gave me in a more positive light so that my stakeholders would be more apt to accept them and mitigate them, right? So essentially I reduced the cognitive dissonance by using AI so that I could represent to my stakeholders risk in such a light that they would want to resolve them and not run away from them. And so AI did that. So essentially, behavioral science becomes not less used as AI comes to the picture. It becomes the center of everything, essentially.
Galen Low:I love that notion of like, you know, a prompt is a nudge, actually. And also, you can prompt an AI to reframe something so that it's a little less cognitively dissonant than it was either in your head or out of the LLM, you know, to begin with. Super clever. I wish I had added that into my risk management using AI workshop. Awesome. Listen, I'll end with a question that's a little bit more inspirational and less of a hardball. Given everything we've been talking about around, you know, behavioral project management and its relationship with project methodologies. Like, where is the future of project methodologies headed? Do you want to make a few predictions?
Josh Ramirez:So one, I think that the absolute methodologies of waterfall, agile, and everything in between, I think we're already seeing it becoming more hybrid, right? With AI in the picture, it'll start to take over the mundane parts of Agile and Waterfall. And that with behavioral science and neuroscience come into the picture, I think that AI mixed with behavioral science will essentially be center and be key, and the methodologies that we use today will essentially, they're not going to go away, but a lot of it will be automated. And so, as AI comes into the picture, like I said before, decision making becomes even more so pushed to the project manager because the PM already has a lot of automation going on. And so now they have to use their brain essentially more than maybe what they're used to in the past. I'm hoping that organizations will also realize that with that comes higher cognitive load. And a higher cognitive load is associated also with System 1 and heuristics and biases. So I think the future will be really cool in project management, because in 10 years, I hope to see it, maybe even five years, I hope to see much of our project management software designed around humans. And that a lot of government policy, a lot of procedures, PMOs essentially become more centered around human thinking. Because if we realize anything above everything, projects are by humans for humans. And so if we center our thinking around, hey, it's also the humans we're creating this for, but it's also the humans who are managing it. And there are ways to solve, you know, the 50% of projects that go awry and go over budget and, you know, get behind schedule.
Galen Low:I like that model of where, you know, in the solar system model, actually the behavioral science side of things is the sun, and our methodologies can orbit around that, and that's okay. Sometimes you need a gas giant, sometimes you need a terrestrial planet, you know, it's all good. But at the center of it is the humans. And that's what will influence it going ahead.
Josh Ramirez:And realize our brain is not just a feeling machine, it's a thinking machine.
Galen Low:I'm using that as a poll quote for this episode.
Josh Ramirez:Do that, yeah.
Galen Low:Josh, thanks so much for hanging out with me today. This has been a lot of fun, I found it really insightful. If folks want to learn more about what you do in the Institute, like, where can they go?
Josh Ramirez:So, if you go to behavioralpm.com, that's our institute page. You can also click on the membership tab and become a member for free up there. And then we also have our certification, which is the NeuralPlan NPPQ certification. So if you go to neural-plan.com, it's also there. By the way, you can get certified on a monthly payment plan, by the way, if you're in Canada or the U.S. Obviously subject to eligibility. So that makes it a little bit more convenient. So by the way, neural is spelled NEURAL. So it's neural-plan.com. So that's our certification as well.
Galen Low:Very cool. I'm going to include all those links in the show notes as well. Thanks again. This has been great.
Josh Ramirez:Yeah, it's been my pleasure, for sure. I appreciate the invitation.
Galen Low:Alright folks, there you have it. As always, if you'd like to join the conversation with over a thousand like minded project management champions, come and join our collective. Head on over to thedigitalprojectmanager.com/membership to learn more. And if you like what you heard today, please subscribe and stay in touch on thedigitalprojectmanager.com. Until next time, thanks for listening.