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It’s well known that many IT projects end up troubled in some way. Many of the problems with theseprojects are never noticed until the project is approaching completion, and it’s possible that a phenomenonthat psychologists call ‘cognitive dissonance’ may be at least partially responsible for this. Luther Martin explains what cognitive dissonance is and how to address the problem.

The failure of some IT projects may be just due to the way in which our brainsprocess information instead of any failingson the part of the people involved withimplementing the projects.

The Standish Group, an Americanconsultancy that specialises in trackingthe success of IT projects, estimatesthat most of them end up troubled insome way. Some are cancelled beforecompletion. Others deliver only reduced

functionality, cost more than anticipatedor take longer than planned. [The trend isin the right direction, however, with fewer

failures happening as people get better atmanaging these tricky projects].

As IT projects progress, many problemsseem to surface at the last minute, whenprojects that seem to be on time and withintheir budget strangely develop problems just before their completion. This causesschedule slippages and cost overruns aswell as headaches for everyone involved.The cause of this phenomenon, as wellas a reasonable way to address it, may be

rooted in the way that our brains work.Cognitive dissonance is a term that

psychologists use to describe whathappens in our brains when we try tosimultaneously hold two contradictorybeliefs. Experiments have shown thatour beliefs can actually be altered due tothis effect. So if you believe one point ofview, but prepare and give a presentationsupporting an opposing point of view, it’slikely that your opinion will actually bealtered by doing this as your brain tries toreconcile the apparent contradiction of youbelieving one thing but saying another.

A classic experiment by psychologists LeonFestinger and James Carlsmith in 1959

COGNITIVE DISSONANCE

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PROJECT MANAGEMENT

showed that people who had to describe atedious and onerous task in positive termsactually changed their opinion of the task,believing that it was not quite as bad as itonce seemed. Apparently their brains triedto reconcile the fact that they shouldn’t belying about the task with their memory ofdisliking doing it, and decided that if theywere describing it in a positive way then itcouldn’t have been quite as bad to beginwith. Even more curiously, if subjectswere paid enough, they didn’t change theiropinion of the task. They were apparentlyable to understand that they were justsaying what they were paid to say insteadof actually coming to believe it.

So it seems that conflicting information

can confuse our brain and can actuallycause it to create new beliefs or modifyexisting ones to eliminate any conflicts thatit encounters. It will also sometimes ignoreinformation that contradicts establishedbeliefs. Further studies have shown thatsuffering from the effects of cognitivedissonance seem to be independent ofgender and culture, so it may just be partof the way our brains work. This meansthat we probably can’t eliminate it, but wecan probably learn to understand it and tocompensate for its effects.

It may be the case that project managerssometimes suffer from the effects ofcognitive dissonance, and this effectmay cause some of the problems that ITprojects experience. Project managerscertainly want to believe that the projectis going to be a success. This means thatwhen they’re presented with informationthat contradicts this position, their brainsmay create new facts in an attempt tomake the new information more consistentwith their belief that the project will be asuccess. To others, this may look like theproject managers are just ignoring the fact

that their project is going off track, but itmay actually be more complicated thanthat. The project manager’s brain mayactually have tricked them into believingthat their project is still on track, eventhough the available information seems toclearly contradict this.

This means that you may tell a projectmanager that there’s an issue that’sgoing to affect the cost or scheduleof their project and their brain maysimply not allow them to believe thisnew information. They may not really

understand that the cost or scheduleof the project will be affected becausebelieving this conflicts with the

established belief that the project will beon time and within its planned budget.They may not realise that there is aproblem until it’s too late, and the cost andschedule slippage has already occurred.

Regular reviews and demonstrationsof the progress of IT projects seem toproduce reality checks that make it clearwhether or not a project has problems.But because such reviews are often doneclose to the end of projects or the phasesthat comprise them, many problems areonly acknowledged when it’s almost too

late to do anything about them. If theinability to recognise problems until they’reclearly demonstrated is due to cognitivedissonance, even the most dedicated andexperienced project manager may besusceptible to this problem.

The original experiment by Festingerand Carlsmith suggests that one way tohelp project managers avoid the affectsof cognitive dissonance is to pay themlarge salaries. If they’re paid enoughthen they may be able to stay objectiveabout the progress of their projects. On

the other hand, it might be difficult to sellthis solution to upper management, so analternative is probably more useful!

A more realistic way to address thispotential problem is to do your best toquantify everything and to track the progressof projects with metrics that are easy toverify. It may be easy for our brains to trickus into believing things that aren’t true, butif we insist on using verifiable quantitativemethods to support our claims of meetingmilestones on the way to completing aproject then we’re much less likely to fallprey to the biases that our brains have.We’re only human, after all.

Luther Martin is Chief Security Architect at

Voltage Security. He can be contacted at:martin@voltage.com