The podcast by project managers for project managers. How does the established project management approach fall short when managing complexity in projects? Kieran Duck wrote the book The Complex Project Toolkit that describes the use of design thinking to deliver your most challenging projects.

Table of Contents

02:35 … The Complex Project Toolkit Book03:52 … Standard Project Management vs. Managing Complex Projects06:38 … Complicated Versus Complex07:19 … A Design-Driven Toolkit08:58 … Is Agile Not For Complex Projects?11:43 … Mindsets, Practices, and Skills13:27 … “Why” Before “What” in a Complex Project17:06 … Inspiring the Shift to a Complexity Mindset20:42 … Individuals Hold Themselves Accountable23:08 … Conversations25:13 … Sense-Making27:18 … Adaption29:50 … Words of Advice31:48 … Get in Touch with Kieran33:24 … Closing

KIERAN DUCK: You know, in complexity, I go back to it’s all connected.  No one person knows the answer.  So pick a good one.  Create the context that works well for this team.  And if they’re having a horrible experience, change it. I really believe that these projects can injure people, won’t take your finger off, but it can really blow people up.  And so create the right context for doing well.

WENDY GROUNDS:  Welcome to Manage This, the podcast by project managers for project managers.  This is our bimonthly program where we like to talk about what matters to professional project managers.  And it’s our goal to give you some words of advice and to give you encouragement, where you can hear from other professionals and leaders in the field.  We’re glad you’re joining us.  If you like what you hear, please visit us at Velociteach.com and leave us a comment on our website.

I am Wendy Grounds, and joining me in the studio is Bill Yates.  Our guest today is Kieran Duck.  Kieran is talking to us from Sydney.  He is an advisor and coach to senior leaders running complex projects and transforming organizations.  He has redesigned and rescued multibillion-dollar projects and led business transformations.  He’s also a global presenter on using design thinking to drive step changes in project and business performance.  He’s also recently authored a book called “The Complex Project Toolkit.”

BILL YATES:  Yes.  The subtitle was “Using Design Thinking to Transform the Delivery of Your Hardest Projects.”  This is really intriguing to me.  You know, right from the cover he had me hooked.  And Kieran says, okay, look, I’ve seen this over and over and over in my career.  Maybe you guys can relate.  We have a way of managing standard projects, and it works well if your project is standard.

But what if it’s complex?  What if there’s a level to this that just doesn’t fit that toolset?  And he gives the example of, you know, taking a hammer and trying to drive a screw into a board.  It’s ugly and doesn’t look very nice when you’re done with it.  So he makes the case for, okay, if you have a complex project, you need a different toolkit.  And then he describes the toolkit.  This is an intriguing conversation.  I think some people may even find it a little bit controversial.

WENDY GROUNDS:  Yes.

BILL YATES:  Because they don’t want to give up their standard tools.

WENDY GROUNDS:  Yes, yes.  And Kieran welcomes that.  If you do find anything you disagree with, you’re welcome to reach out to him.  He’d love to hear your opinions, as well.  Kieran, welcome to Manage This.  Thank you so much for being our guest.

KIERAN DUCK:  Thanks for inviting me.  Great to be here.

The Complex Project Toolkit Book

WENDY GROUNDS:  Yeah, we’re excited to talk to you.  I have enjoyed your book.  It’s an excellent book for project managers.  Can you just give us a little bit of background, and what sparked the book?  How did you come about writing this?

KIERAN DUCK:  Yeah, that’s an interesting question.  I mean, over the years I’ve done a lot of work on project management, project rescues, business transformation.  And what I was doing wasn’t really described in project management books and models.  Much more of a focus on people, connecting people, understanding their motivations, taking time to rethink approaches.  So this isn’t really what you read about when you just hear about scoping and planning.

Then a few years ago I worked with a design firm.  And what that did, it opened up a different way of thinking.  And it put a name to what I was doing.  You know, the more I explored design thinking, the more it explained this different way of approaching projects.  So I hadn’t seen this brought to life anywhere.  And I remember sitting on a plane flying back from a conference one time going, I’ve really got to write this down.  I saw that this is something that some people do quite naturally, but it’s also something that could be taught.  So it was really that desire to write down what I’ve seen as really effective practice when it comes to complexity.

Standard Project Management vs. Managing Complex Projects

BILL YATES:  One of the things that I appreciate that you do right at the beginning of the book is you say this is not replacing project management as you may be practicing it today.

KIERAN DUCK:  Right.

BILL YATES:  There are times when standard project management practices are perfectly appropriate.  For many, they would say throughout my lifetime or my career I can use standard project management methods and be successful.  However, there are certain projects that are just too complex.  That complexity meter gets dialed up.  And to your point, this book addresses those situations.  Talk to us a bit about that.  If you look at like standard project management approaches, how does that fall short when managing a complex project?

KIERAN DUCK:  I think it’s useful to make clear what that distinction is.  You know, I talk about complicated being technically difficult.  You need to find all the parts; but, you know, it’s bounded.  Whereas complex projects are what I’d call socially difficult.  There’s a great example in Australia of when we built a big hydroelectric scheme in the 1950s.  We brought in people from overseas.  It was working in a whole new alpine wilderness area.  It took 25 years to build, but it finished on time, on budget.  And the problem there was coordinating all these resources.  But it was bringing in expertise from overseas.

Now, interestingly, that finished in the 1970s.  By the 1990s, there were a whole bunch of environmental activists complaining about the fact that the dam had restricted flows downstream.  And so a campaign was started to restore the flows, at least some of the flows.  And it took until 2017 to do that.  You know, the point of that, it took 25 years to build this massive scheme of hundreds of kilometers of pipe, and it took 25 years to turn the flow back on.  So the first bit was complicated, but the second bit was complex.  And complex is about when you’ve got all these opinions involved and you, you know, there are five characteristics that I highlight.

One of them is this idea that things are subjective.  Depends on your opinion.  The same information gives a different result.  The situation is connected so no one person can see the answer.  There’s not one person you go to to explain the whole situation; where often in complicated there’s an expert.  There’s somebody who can guide you through it.  I also talk about them being unknowable.  You don’t know what the problem’s going to be until you get into it. 

And that’s what you see with that dam example is that things changed.  Politicians changed.  Everything kept changing on the way through.  So there’s no way to write a plan at the beginning and step all the way through it.  It was unique.  Nobody had done that before.  And it was constrained in that it was very high visibility, and lots of opinions involved.  And it really affects your degrees of freedom on a project when everybody’s playing in this game and adding their $.10 worth.

Complicated Versus Complex

BILL YATES:  That’s an excellent example.  The way you write about that in the book is perfect.  I think it lays out those characteristics and puts meat to it and helps you understand. 

KIERAN DUCK:  Yeah, yeah.  I mean, the other one I used in the book to really bring it back to a fairly simple version is complicated versus complex.  If you think about how many fire stations you might need in a city, that’s a route optimization.  It’s a complicated problem.  Working all that out is complicated.  But the complexity comes when you’re trying to close one of those fire stations and trying to get an agreement, and everybody gets involved.  So when we see complicated problems, standard project works.  But when you get to complexity, and you’ve got all these opinions, you need an enhanced toolkit for that.

A Design-Driven Toolkit

WENDY GROUNDS:  Kieran, I want to talk about “The Complex Project Toolkit,” the book that you just published.  And you introduce the toolkit as a design-driven toolkit.  What do you mean by “design-driven”?

KIERAN DUCK:  So for me, design thinking is a particular way of seeing the world.  The heart of it, it’s bringing people into consideration.  I make the argument that the standard project management comes from a scientific background.  It’s about modeling the future.  It’s about controlling and proving.  It has all these elements of science to it that came out of scientific management.  Within that, you’ve got to realize that the root of science is actually removing the individual.  Beginning in “Scientific Revolution” talked about removing the flawed experience of humans for science to be able to have something that’s provable, repeatable, and you understand the world by pulling it apart.

Design thinking comes from a different place.  It comes from its belief that people are at the center,