Episode transcript The transcript is generated automatically by Podscribe, Sonix, Otter and other electronic transcription services.
Hello everyone, here is Ricardo Vargas, and this is the 5 Minutes Podcast. Today I want to start with a simple question. When was the last time a two-day delay caught your attention? I am not talking about a big delay, the kind that turns into a crisis and an emergency meeting. I am talking about the small one. The one that shows up in the status report, someone says "we will catch up next week," and the meeting moves on. The first time, that delay bothers us. The second time, it already looks normal. By the fifth time, nobody mentions it anymore. There is a name for this: the normalization of deviance. The idea comes from the American sociologist Diane Vaughan, who studied the Challenger space shuttle accident in 1986. What she showed is very uncomfortable for all of us who work on projects. The accident did not happen because of one crazy decision made on a single day. Engineers had already seen signs of damage on the seals of the booster rockets on earlier flights. Every time the problem showed up and nothing serious happened, the deviation was accepted as part of normal. The risk did not go away. It just became invisible. And this made me think about our projects. Because projects rarely break all at once. They slowly get used to being wrong. Let me give you some examples we have all seen. The test that should happen before every delivery, but was skipped "just this once" because the deadline was tight. And then it was skipped again. The risk that has been red in the risk register for three months, and nobody asks why anymore. The meeting with the sponsor that was weekly, then became every two weeks, and now happens when there is time. The supplier that always delivers one week late, and the team simply adds that week to the plan without discussing it. None of this looks serious. And that is exactly the problem. Each small deviation, on its own, has a good explanation. But together, they change what the team thinks is normal. And when normal changes, our alarms stop ringing. There is a sentence I hear a lot in projects, and today it scares me a little: "It has always been like this, and it never caused a problem." This sentence does not prove that the risk is low. Many times, it only proves that we have been lucky so far.
Not having a problem is not the same as being safe. So, what can we do? I do not believe in a magic formula here, but I see three attitudes that make a big difference. The first is to look at the trend, not only at today's number. A two-day delay does not say much. Six two-day delays in six weeks tell a completely different story. We need to ask this question in our status meetings: is this an event, or is this a pattern? The second attitude is to write our rules before the pressure arrives. If the test is mandatory, it is mandatory in the difficult week too. If we decide to make an exception, that is fine, but it must be a conscious decision, written down, with an owner and an end date. An exception without an end date is not an exception. It is the new rule, and nobody voted for it. The third attitude is probably the hardest. We need to protect the people who say "this is not normal." In many teams, the person who raises their hand becomes the annoying one, the pessimist, the one who is not a team player. And then everyone learns to stay quiet.
Very often, people from outside see the deviation better than we do. The new team member, the auditor, the consultant, the colleague from another department. They have not gotten used to it yet. That is why it is so useful to ask someone new: what looks strange to you here? The answer can be worth more than any report. I have fallen into this trap too. I have accepted a yellow signal for so long that it stopped looking yellow. Not because of a lack of skill, but because our brain adapts to what it sees every day. This is human. But as project managers and sponsors, our job is exactly to see what others have stopped seeing. So I leave you with a challenge for this week. Take your last status report and look for something that has been wrong for so long that nobody talks about it anymore. It can be a risk, a delay, a test, or a meeting. Then ask the simplest question of all: when did this become normal? This may be the most important question in your project today.
I hope you enjoyed this episode, and see you next week with another 5 Minutes Podcast.
