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Hello everyone, here is Ricardo Vargas, and this is the 5 Minutes Podcast.
In March 2023, I recorded an episode with a very direct title: "Trust Me, We Can Control Much Less Than We Think."
Today I want to make a provocation that sounds like the exact opposite.
I believe that, in a project, we control much more than we think. No, I did not change my mind. Or maybe I changed it just a little. In that episode, I talked about predictions and about Professor Philip Tetlock's research showing how often experts get it wrong when they try to guess the future. I still think we are terrible at predicting. But predicting and controlling are two different things. Predicting is trying to guess what will happen six months from now.
Controlling is seeing early what is already happening, and deciding before the crisis decides for us. There is a number that has been in my head for many years, and I want to be transparent about it. I don't have a study that proves it. It is my own reading after many projects, in many countries, with many different teams. I believe that 60 to 70 percent of what happens in a project is within reach of a well-structured team.
These are things the team can control, detect before they become problems, or decide in advance. Only around 30 percent is really a matter of chance. The curious part is that many people believe the opposite. They think most of it is luck, and that the project manager can only influence a small slice of the story.
Think about the last lessons learned at the meeting you attended. How many times did you hear the words "bad luck"? The supplier was late. The key person quit. It rained too much. The client changed the requirement. But if we look a little more calmly, the story changes. The supplier that was late had been sending signals for months, with partial deliveries, slow answers, and people constantly changing on their team. The key person who quit was the only one who knew how to run that system, and everybody knew it. The rain came exactly during the rainy season. Rain in the rainy season is not bad luck. It is the calendar. And the client who changed the requirement had been talking about it in the hallways for weeks, but nobody brought it to the meeting. None of this was uncontrollable.
It was simply uncontrolled. And understanding that difference is a big part of our job as project managers. There is a simple test that I really like. Michael Mauboussin, in his book The Success Equation, suggests one question to find out if an activity depends on skill or only on luck: Can you lose on purpose? In roulette, nobody can lose on purpose. In chess, anyone can, and very easily. So let me ask: can we make a project fail on purpose?
Of course we can. We just need to avoid talking to the sponsor, accept every change without analysis, hide the delay until the last week, and never ask the team what is keeping them up at night. If we can fail on purpose, then the result does not depend only on luck. Our hands are all over that story. So why do we blame bad luck so much? Because bad luck is comfortable. When the project succeeds, it is competence. When it failed, it was bad luck. Psychologists call this the self-serving bias, the tendency to keep the credit for ourselves and put the blame on circumstances. We all fall into it, and I include myself on that list.
The problem is that bad luck is the only stakeholder that never shows up at the meeting to defend itself. It takes the blame in silence. And while it takes the blame, we learn nothing. What changes in a well-structured team? First, it sees things earlier. And it only sees earlier because people feel safe to bring bad news early, when it is still cheap.
Second, it decides earlier. The team sits down calmly and agrees on what it will do: if the supplier is more than two weeks late, we activate the second supply option; if the key person leaves, someone who is already being prepared takes over. A decision made in calm times costs little. A decision made in the middle of a crisis is expensive, and it is almost always worse.
Third, it honestly separates what chance from what was carelessness. We don't need witch hunts, but we can't accept easy excuses either. And what about the 30 percent chance? It exists, and I don't want to pretend it doesn't. A pandemic, an earthquake, a law that changes overnight. Even in these cases, what we do the next morning still depends on us. So I want to leave you with a challenge for this week. Take the last problem you called bad luck and ask two questions.
Was there any signal before?
Was there any decision we could have made earlier?
If the answer is yes to either one, it was not bad luck.
The biggest danger of believing that almost everything is luck is that this belief proves itself. If we think 70 percent of the project is luck, we stop taking care of that 70 percent. And slowly, it really does become bad luck.
I hope you enjoyed this episode, and see you next week with another 5 Minutes Podcast.
