The Podcast by project managers for project managers. Hear how to approach complex modern projects by spending less time discussing the past and more time focused on the future. Eddie Obeng says we should: “take the learning back to the work place” by analyzing our past performance, and rapidly applying what we’ve learned to deliver perfect projects. Listen in for practical advice about facing your fears, organizational culture, and dealing with the challenges of change management. 

Table of Contents

01:25 … Meet Eddie02:00 … QUBE – Learning and Transformation04:30 … QUBE for the Project Manager07:05 … Qubots08:00 … Delivering Projects by Looking Ahead11:06 … How do We Intentionally Mess up Projects?13:39 … Choosing the Right Project leader15:18 … Four Things We Mess up18:09 … Organization’s Culture Affecting a Project21:36 … Subconsciously Sabotaging Our Projects23:08 … Sabotaging Projects by Remaining Silent24:28 … Reporting Your Doubts and Fears27:58 … Change Management32:31 … Get in Touch with Eddie33:42 … Closing

EDDIE OBENG: I’m asking you to look forward through the windscreen as opposed to the habit of let’s make a guess of what’s through the windscreen, and drive and manage, coordinate through the rearview mirror.  Completely different mindset.

WENDY GROUNDS:  Welcome to Manage This, the podcast by project managers for project managers.  I’m your host, Wendy Grounds, and joining me is Bill Yates.  Just a quick note.  If you’re looking to acquire PDUs, Professional Development Units, towards your recertifications, you can still claim those PDUs for all our podcast episodes.  Just listen up at the end of the show for information on how you can do that.

So today we have a really interesting guest.  This is Professor Eddie Obeng.  Professor Obeng was born in Ghana but has lived most of his life in the U.K.  He’s a world-class educator and has a passion for helping project managers.

BILL YATES:  Yeah.  I’m going to give a quick preview of some of my favorite pieces of the conversation we’re going to have.  Eddie talks about recognizing the project environment and then choosing the best leadership approach based on one of four types of projects.  I think people are going to find that very useful and helpful.  Another thing, very practical advice that Eddie gives is facing your fear.  We talk about that, pretty straightforward.  And the teaser there is it’s okay if we don’t have all the answers in the moment.  I think that’ll be quite helpful to those listeners who are like me.

Meet Eddie

WENDY GROUNDS:  Hi, Eddie.  Welcome.  We’re looking forward to talking with you today.

EDDIE OBENG:  Hello.  Delighted to be here.

WENDY GROUNDS:  I want to know who is Eddie Obeng.  Can you tell us a little bit about yourself?

EDDIE OBENG:  Just to give you some background, I teach.  I’m an educator.  I teach businesses, I help them transform, I do this based on material that I research myself.  And I built a virtual business school with a different way to teach people to deal with the complexity of the world.  And I’m also an entrepreneur because I took that business school, and I’ve made it digital, and I’ve got lots of people in the team and so on.  So that’s probably me.  I’ve written books, couple of bestsellers and stuff.

QUBE – Learning and Transformation

BILL YATES:  So tell us more about QUBE.  It’s Q-U-B-E.  Now, tell us more about this other environment.

EDDIE OBENG:  Yeah, so QUBE is my shortcut to learning and transformation.  From the point of view of the person who is experiencing QUBE, literally everything you need to be able to do, which you’re struggling to do right now.  So for example we are on Skype, but you’re scribbling your different bits of paper.  Maybe if we’re in the same room we could write on a whiteboard.  And it would stay there, and you could come back later, and if we had lots of room, people could have offices to move around in.  And when I’m teaching you.  I could write on a whiteboard.  I could say “Off you go and have a break.  I’ll come back in five minutes.”

So all the things which we want to do together, but we actually have to do when we’re dispersed, QUBE does all of those.  But the real secret sauce is because nobody knows how to behave on QUBE, you can use it both for learning and for transformation.  For example, corporations, which are very traditional, doing innovation.  They don’t know any better.  You say, now we need new ideas.  And then they all come up with new ideas.  They don’t argue with you.  So it’s like a little magic trick I have for getting people to learn and transform.

BILL YATES:  What motivated you to create this environment?

EDDIE OBENG:  Bit of background.  So I used to work at a proper business school, a place called Ashridge.  And we used to do in the old days, basically the companies would send these people to us as a sort of punishment or whether it was a prize.  We would inter them in that room for five days and talk at them.

BILL YATES:  Yeah.

EDDIE OBENG:  And then after five days they would emerge, and then we’d see them the next promotion step.  And then the world started accelerating.  So they went, we can’t come for five days.  We want three-day modules.  So they’d come, and we’d lock them up for three days instead.  But what never happened was we never took the learning back to the workplace with them.  So they’d leave, and you had no idea whether anything you taught them was any use, or what they’d done with it.  And I was quite determined that as the world was accelerating, it was important that we not only learned, but we put it into practice and transformed our organizations.  Question:  How do you do that without flying people backwards and forwards all the time?

So I left Ashridge, and I started Pentacle.  And the idea behind Pentacle is really simple:  learn and do.  Then the question was how on earth do you do that with grownups?  And so that’s where QUBE came from.  It’s basically so we can keep people learning, trying out, building their confidence, dealing with their tutors, talking to the other colleagues, and then bringing them together to do some more learning as they transform their organizations.  It basically is a solution to the headache which everyone’s got, which is how on earth do you make change happen?

BILL YATES:  Yes.

QUBE for the Project Manager

WENDY GROUNDS:  We like to tell our project managers about tools that they could use.  So how would you suggest that a project manager uses this within their organization?

EDDIE OBENG:  Yeah.  So the best way to understand QUBE is I sometimes talk about it like a pyramid.  Because QUBE uses computers, everyone goes, oh, it’s a software tool.  A software tool would be something like a PowerPoint or a Miro, a Miro board or something like Office 365.  QUBE contains tools.  So if we’d been doing this on QUBE, the first thing we’d have done when we got together is we’d have chatted, like we did. 

And then I would say, “Great, guys, within this podcast what are your greatest hopes?”  And we’d have gone to a whiteboard, and we’d have stuck up stickies of all the things you want from this.  Then I’d have said, “What are your greatest fears?”  And you’d have stuck up all of those.  And then we would have spent about a minute making sure none of the fears are going to come through before we started on the hopes.

That’s what we call a “tool” on QUBE.  It’s a performance enhancement, people engagement tool called Hopes and Fears.  So the tools help people to think together and make their projects more aligned.  So that’s how we use tools.  Does that make sense? 

BILL YATES:  Yeah.  So it’s like a platform that you bring familiar tools into, but it’s the environment of the platform they’re using.

EDDIE OBENG:  Oh, I like you so much.  I can’t tell you how much I like you.  Because not only are there tools, but the way we would work together, if you were on QUBE as avatars, we call them Qubots, would be a room.  And we’d call the rooms – believe it – Qubicles with a Q.

BILL YATES:  Of course.

EDDIE OBENG:  Okay?  In the room there will be a whiteboard.  There will be a TV screen or computer screen where we can look at whatever we need to, or watch videos.  There’s probably somewhere else like a desk where we can leave sticky notes for each other.  Might be somewhere we can gather in a circle, a nice seating area with a sound bubble so we can have multiple conversations.  And so that’s what we call a platform.  But other people think of a platform as Slack or Teams or whatever else.  So you get platforms into our Qubicle.  The tools which are these performance tools easily get people working together and thinking together and delivering stuff straight away.

But the whole game of course is learning and transformation.  So QUBE, the focus is on the learning and transformation, and the platform and tools are just to enable it.  So a project leader who just wanted to get some work done and was already scaled up would just pick up the right tool.  Working with other people, they probably invite them into the Qubicle.  But if they needed to learn something new, aha, now it gets interesting because now we have to diagnose what they want.  We have to understand where it fits in the context of their organization.  Then we have to understand what platform, what Qubicle, and what tools can they use instantly to start moving forward.

Qubots

WENDY GROUNDS:  It was really cool.  I loved watching that.  We saw the little avatars, and we took a look at it.  So very cool.

EDDIE OBENG:  The avatars are really funny because we started with human-shaped avatars, and we discovered everyone spends all their time building their avatars.  And then we discovered there’s this really quite interesting bit of psychology here.