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Hi everyone. Here is Ricardo Vargas, and this is the 5 Minutes Podcast. Today, I would like to discuss with you why it's so challenging for us to accept that we have a project in crisis, why I'm recording this, and why this is so important. One of the critical things to find a solution when you are handling a troubled project is to accept that you are in trouble and that is why it's so hard for you to accept. So let me give you three reasons for that. The first reason it's because it's not culturally accepted to accept that we are leading, or we are a key member of a project that is in crisis. And why? Because we are always hired by companies, by clients where they think that we just have superpowers, that we are fail-proof, we do not make mistakes. So, with this stigma, it's very hard for you to accept that you are in trouble. And it's so easy to see this because sometimes we see projects that are late running completely wrong. And when you talk to the people leading them, they say, no, it's perfectly normal. This is what is happening. It's absolutely normal. It's completely expected, and it's not. But because we are blocked from accepting that we are in crisis, because crisis may make us look incompetent. And people do not understand that crises are generated for many, many reasons and many of them are outside our control.
The second reason for that is because we always think that if things are bad now, we will be able to fix correct and nobody will even notice the problem. You know, we will be able to hide. I would say that challenge, and this is also not true. Let me tell you, your ability to recover is much, but it's much lower than our ability to make things even worse. When we are in crisis, it's 10 to 1, 100 to 1. So if your project got in trouble to take it out of trouble, it requires, I would say, 100 times more energy than in normal conditions. And if you or us, if we were unable to do that in normal conditions, how on earth we will be able now to do this in crisis? There is one thing that I really like. When I was doing my master's, it was in earned value project management, and one of the things that I learned based on one instruction by the US government is that if your cost performance index, the difference between your CPI, your cost performance index and your CPI, or two complete performance Index is more than 10%. So you need to improve more than 10%, and your project is at least 25% physically complete. Your chances of recovery are close to zero. It means that entropy is part of your project. So if things are not going well, there is a massive trend that it will become worse.
And this is why you need to turn on the trouble project mindset. If you do not turn on, and if you do not put a different type of energy, things will only spiral down. And the third reason. The third reason is all about job. Job safety. Because if look on the reason what people are thinking, that they hired someone with superpowers and they see that they did not, they hired just a human being that is doing the best to protect the project and to deliver the results. So what happens? You try to hide because you are afraid of losing your job or losing your contract. And this just create more and more challenges. Again, why it's so important for us to accept when we are in crisis mode. Because if we accept, we are doing the first step to change the mindset of the project, to find different solutions and try to recover the project or save what is possible on the project. Remember, projects are not an easy task. They require a different mindset and a different perspective, and one of them is our ability to understand and accept when things are not going the way we expect. And this requires a lot of effort, a lot of confidence, self-confidence and discipline. And I hope all of you are able to do that. I hope you enjoy this podcast and see you next week with another 5 Minutes Podcast.
