OK – you’re not really a terrible PM. You know your stuff, you’ve mastered JIRA, and you’re totally on top of things. And yet things still go sideways, tasks are late, and everyone is kind of cranky by the end. So we do some root cause analysis try to figure out where it went wrong… but we don’t go deep enough. It turns out, the source of the problem is all in our heads. We’re just not naturally wired for project management. Examples abound: – Why do we not foresee risks? It’s the illusion of control, compounded by confirmation bias. – Why are we bad at estimating? Blame the planning fallacy and optimism bias. – Why does work not stay on schedule? A combination of Parkinson’s Law and student syndrome. This session will answer all these questions and others by drawing on the fields of psychology, neuroscience and behavioural economics and applying it to project management. Finally, we’ll close out by exploring debiasing strategies to help counter the misguided tendencies of our brains.

1. Slides 2-3: Intro
● Our brains aren’t as impressive as we like to think. They weren’t designed for the world
we live in today and - and they’re ​especially​ not good at the kind of work that we do as
project managers.
Slides 4: Information Overload
● Google’s Eric Schmidt said that if you took all the information created from the dawn of
civilization up to 2003, it would total about the same amount that we now create every
two days (as of 2010).
Slides 5: Fatigue
● Brain fatigue takes things from bad to worse. Now it’s harder to concentrate, it’s harder
to remember what you’re hearing, and your willpower is at its lowest.
● There’s a concept called Decision Fatigue that states that the more decisions you make
in a day, the harder they get. You tend to resort to lazy decision-making, which tend to
be either wrong or just safe.
● Example: a 10-month long study done with Israeli judges whose job was to decide
whether or not to grant parole to prisoners. At the start of the day, when they were fresh,
they granted parole in about 65% of the cases. As the day went on, this number dropped
to about 0% as they resorted to status quo decision-making.
● The spikes in the graph are right after lunch and right after dinner. Part of that is due to
the break, but part of it is because your brain functions on glucose, so getting something
to eat helped boost brain energy.
Slide 6: Strategies for Information Overload and Fatigue
1. Rest: get enough at least 7 hours of sleep a night and take non-work-related breaks
throughout the day. Examples: take a walk, play a game, listening to music, go the gym,
meditate. Try the Pomodoro Technique.
2. Eat: have a good breakfast and eat some healthy snacks throughout the day.
3. Move: exercise, especially if the bulk of your day is sitting in a chair all day.
4. Plan: schedule your day with your most important meetings or work at the start of the
day or right after lunch. Avoid back-to-back meetings - they’re exhausting. Practice
single-tasking, with blocks of time in your schedule so that you can focus on one thing at
a time.
5. Cheat: take mental shortcuts to reduce mental load. This can take the form of gut
intuition, rules of thumb or heuristics.
Slides 7-10: Heuristics Intro
● Shortcuts are mostly good - you usually get from point A to point B faster than you would
otherwise. But sometimes you end up at point R.
● They speed up the decision-making process, but at the cost of predictable mistakes in
reasoning.
● Example: bat and ball problem.

2. ● The Linda Problem. Based on the information provided, what is more likely:
○ Linda is a bank teller
○ Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement
● 90% of people pick the latter, which is impossible because it’s a subset of the former.
● This is caused by:
○ Representative Heuristic - when we make a judgement about something based
on how closely it seems to fit into a particular category.
○ Conjunction Fallacy - we assume that specific things are more likely than general
ones
● We like harmonious or plausible stories that make sense to us intuitively because
thinking through these things logically takes time and effort.
Slides 11-15: Risk Management
● Paul Slovik’s study on perception of risk shows that we’re not really good at estimating
risks.
○ Tornados vs. asthma - most people think tornados, but asthma kills 20 times
more people.
○ Lightning vs. botulism - most people think it’s botulism, but lightning is over 50
times more likely.
○ Accidents vs. diabetes - the estimate was that accidents killed 300 times more
people than diabetes. The reality is that diabetes is 4 times more likely.
● This is caused by the Availability Heuristic, which is when we use whatever information
comes to mind most quickly. It might be something you can easily think of lots of
examples of, something you’ve heard or seen a lot recently (killer clowns), or it could just
be a particularly vivid or personal example.
● Our risk registers are full of stuff that’s really quite unlikely, and missing out on all the
mundane risks that don’t come easily to mind.
● Probability Neglect causes us to mess up the likelihood of a given risk. 30% likely? 70%
likely? We’re not good at distinguishing all those shades of grey.
● A study done at the University of Chicago that showed that people were equally afraid of
a 99% chance of toxic contamination as a 1% change.
● Related test: there are two boxes. One has 50 yellow balls and 50 green balls. The other
has 100 yellow and green balls, but you don’t know the ratio. You get to randomly
choose one ball from one box. If it’s yellow, you get $100. Next, we change it up so that
you get $100 for a green ball. Which box do you want to choose from now?
● Logically, if you chose box A the first time, you must choose Box B the next time.
Clearly, logic is not at play here. Instead, it’s called Ambiguity Aversion. We’d rather go
with a known probability (a risk) than an unknown probability (uncertainty).
● We also make mistakes when it comes to mitigating risk. There’s a big psychological
payoff to taking something to 100% sure (the Certainty Effect) or to 0% (the Zero Risk
Bias). In both cases, we spend too much effort here instead of focusing our attention on
potentially big gains in the murky middle.

3. ● In many cases, it just doesn’t matter. Some things are just aren’t controllable. This
includes things like:
○ Chaos Theory - also known as the Butterfly Effect, where some small event
somewhere ends up having huge impacts somewhere else. (A butterfly flapping
its wings in Brazil can cause a tornado in Texas.)
○ Black Swans - major, unpredictable events that have major impacts, such as the
invention of the internet or 9/11.
● PMs especially suffer from what’s called the Illusion of Control - the belief that we can
control more than we really can. Examples:
○ In dice games, people throw the dice harder to try to get high numbers and softer
for lower ones.
○ When people press crossing lights or elevator buttons multiple times. Note:
sometimes they’re not even hooked up. These are called Placebo Buttons and
are just there to make your wait feel more bearable.
Slides 16-25: Estimating
● Switching to something that all PMs are great at: estimating.
● Steve McConnell’s estimation quiz: for each question, fill in the upper and lower bounds,
that in your opinion, give you a 90% chance of including the correct value. Try not to
make your ranges either too wide or too narrow.
● Answers:
○ Surface temperature of the sun - 10,000 F/6,000 C
○ The year of Alexander the Great’s birth - 356 BC
○ Area of the Asian continent - 17,139,000 m2/44,390,000 km2
● Even when estimating for 90%, the average score is 28% 3. So even when we have full
freedom to define our 90% confidence range, we still get it wrong.
● The first problem is classic overconfidence. We simply believe that we’re better at this
than we really are. Pessimists also show the effects of overconfidence - just to a lesser
degree than optimists. Experts are worse than amateurs.
● The second has to do with the two-step process for estimating where we start at a base
number, then adjust it up or down depending on the situation.
● Quick test:
○ For the left side of the room:
■ Did Gandhi die before or after the age of 9?
○ For the right side of the room:
■ Did Gandhi die before or after the age of 140?
○ Then for everyone: How old was Gandhi when he died?
● In test groups, the left side averaged around 50 and the right side was around 67. (The
actual answer is 78.)
● The difference is because of that anchor points, even though they were both clearly
meaningless. It acts as the base rate and we adjust from that point - just not far enough.
● This is called the Anchoring Heuristic and we see it in everyday life all the time. A good
example is suggested prices for houses or cars.

4. ● The main way to avoid it is to be the one that sets the anchor. For example, when setting
deadlines.
● We try to get around this by using 3-point or PERT estimates. That helps, assuming that
our most likely estimate - the anchor - is somewhat accurate. Also, we’re terrible at
estimating the worst case.
● We don’t account for unexpected things even though they almost always happen
because they’re never the same unexpected things.
● There was a study done with students where they had to predict when they were likely to
get a paper done and when the latest they might get it done. Most went past even their
worst case scenarios.
● At the root is something called the Planning Fallacy, developed by Daniel Kahneman
and Amos Tversky, which is simply our tendency to underestimate time, costs and risks.
● Examples:
○ Channel Tunnel - 1 year and £2 billion over budget
○ Sydney Opera House. When it was being planned in 1957, it was estimated to
take 6 years and cost $7 million. Instead, it took 16 years and came in at $102
million - 14 times the original estimate.
○ Your daily to-do lists. How often do you actually finish everything and how often
do you have to roll something forward to the next day? You’ve probably been
doing them for years and years, but you still overestimate how much you can do
in even as short a time scale as a day.
● The driving force of the Planning Fallacy is Optimism Bias. This can come from external
or internal sources.
● External includes your overly optimistic bosses or clients.
● The dark side of this one is known as Strategic Misrepresentation and it mostly happens
within the sales team when they promise budgets or timelines that they know probably
aren’t realistic.
● PMs tend to be optimistic: we like to believe that we can guide our projects to success,
no matter the odds.
● How many of you think that you’re better than average drivers? Most surveys of this
question come up with answers over 90%. This is known as Illusory Superiority - where
you think you’re better than most
Slides 26-29: Procrastination
● If you don’t allocate enough time for a task and then you run out of time to do it, or if the
right tools aren’t in place to do it, that’s not procrastination, that’s just poor planning.
● If the skills to do the work aren’t there or you can’t finish due to perfectionism, those are
different as well.
● Procrastination is when you put off doing something you need to do in order to do
something more relaxing or more enjoyable.
● Piers Steel defined it in a book called The Procrastination Equation. To help avoid
procrastination:
○ Increase expectation that you can succeed; self-confidence

5. ○ Increase the value of the task
○ Increase self-control; ability to avoid distractions; willpower
○ Decrease the time to completion of the task
● Student syndrome is exactly how it sounds. We have a tendency to leave tasks until right
before they’re due.
● Parkinson’s Law can be used to restrict procrastination. If you don’t have time to
procrastinate, it can’t happen.
● Solutions to procrastination:
1. Externalize: external authorities work best. Self-set deadlines tend to be broken.
2. Breakdown: break your work into smaller pieces. David Allen talks about getting
to the point where you know the very next action.
3. Worst 1st: prioritize your work, then do the most difficult things first.
4. Public: announce your commitments to increase accountability.
5. Obstacles: even small things can prevent you from doing tasks. Remove them
and set yourself up for success.
6. Focus: remove distractions so that you can concentrate on the task to be done.
Slides 30: So Much More
● There are 150 more biases, heuristics and fallacies to trip us up.
● They affect much more than risk management and estimating. Also: team dynamics,
client relationships, communication, etc.
Slides 31-34: Debiasing Problems
● Biases are really persistent and hard to shake.
● The first step is just knowing about them - recognizing that they’re there and the impact
they have. But even that doesn’t always help.
● The Confirmation Bias is our (mostly) subconscious tendency to accept information and
arguments that support our existing beliefs and reject those that go against our beliefs.
● Technology also plays a role now through something known as Filter Bubbles. Example:
Facebook or Google keeps track of the things you click on and shows you more like that
and less of anything too different.
● This is a problem, as those outside and contradictory views are really important for us to
get to a right answer. It’s important to make a conscious effort to expose yourself to
opposing viewpoints.
● Also, the Bias Blind Spot, which is a bias that prevents you from seeing your own biases.
Instead, you constantly rationalize your decisions and behavior.
● Visual example: We see two different shades of yellow, but they’re exactly the same.
Even when we know, we can’t help.
Slide 35: Debiasing Strategies
● We’re not going to have a lot of luck changing how our brains work, but we can try to
bypass the stupid spots. Strategies:

6. 1. Slow down: take time to analyze. Use traditional decision-making techniques like pros
and cons list and mathematical calculations.
2. WBS it: Break down problems into smaller pieces - AKA “unpacking.” Shorten
timeframes and pieces to be estimated.
3. Go outside: get an external, objective perspective to remove subjectivity. Use Reference
Class Forecasting, which is using similar, previous projects as a base rate.
4. Pre-mortem: created by psychologist Gary Klein where you ask: “Imagine it is a year
from today. We have followed the plan to the letter. The result is a disaster. Take 5 or 10
minutes to write about this disaster.” This unearths potential risks and problems that you
might otherwise be blind to.
5. Be sad: your mood has an impact on the Optimism Bias, so it’s not a terrible thing to be
a bit melancholy when doing key planning work.. I recommend watching the movie Life is
Beautiful.
6. Remember: find ways to work around your terrible memory. More on that...
Slide 36: Stress
● This whole job can be very stressful. Trying to control the uncontrollable, having
unpleasant conversations on a regular basis, feeling the pressure of accountability - all
of this stuff weighs heavy.
● Connect with your fellow DPMs and stay in touch so you can support each other. We
need to have each others’ backs.
Slide 37: Contact me
● Seriously.