Complex project manager, age 2 years

In a world that has become more complex, ambiguous and uncertain there's a whole bunch of amazing skills which are required to keep big projects from crashing and burning.

Here's a short list: Open-mindedness, adaptability, tolerance of ambiguity, to not jump quickly to conclusions, have a good awareness of fellow team members and how to better serve their needs, to be honest and open with each other in order to develop trust, see things from multiple perspectives and use "gut instinct" well.

Not only are these skill sets in demand for project leaders, but also for people who lead teams distributed everywhere throughout organization systems, so we can more readily help people navigate a rapidly changing world.

Strangely, this complex project manager skill set resembles the skills that kindergarten children already posses or develop, especially the openness to possibility, a thirst for more knowledge and information and preparedness to get on well with other children. If so, then, why, are these skills socialized out of our children by the time they graduate 12 years later, most of them (about 99% actually) removed from the pool of potential complex project managers.

Anecdotal evidence suggest that age and experience and high-level soft skills are prerequisites for becoming complex project managers. Associate Professor Anne Pisarski of Queensland University of Technology Business School is exploring whether it is possible for mid-level managers to develop as complex project managers. Why? They are as scarce as hens's teeth and in high demand.

Anne presented some of her early research findings at our International Centre for Complex Project Management conference in Lille, France (August 23-25, 2011) that suggests it is possible to acquire these skills at an earlier age.

So what if these kinds of skills could be acquired, not from the mid-30s, but from the time we start school, or even before. Many Australian early primary classrooms operate this way, so it should not be that hard. What if our project management people were to have a conversation with primary and secondary educators? Might that make a difference?

Complex projects can be almost anything these days, as more and more organization "projectise" their operations, in order to get new activities started and completed faster. Often they have to beg, borrow, steal (and contract) from across their organizations the many disciplines and resources they need (often temporarily) to get new projects up and running.

Big complex projects can be anything from developing an iron ore mine, upgrading a corporate-wide IT system, keeping peace in a war-torn country, sending a man to Mars, re-inventing school education, developing and launching a new drug, or starting a large-scale self-help project in Africa.

Common features of complex projects are many disciplines, messy politics, short completion time frames, rapidly evolving technologies and methods that are out of date before the project is completed and the intersection of many systems.

So here are some questions/activities for educators to consider:

1. If many more people than ever before are required to play the role of a complex project manager, what can we as teachers do, to prepare young people for these capacities?
2. How might young people learn open-mindedness, adaptability, tolerance of ambiguity, to not jump quickly to conclusions, have a good awareness of fellow team members and how to better serve their needs, to be honest and open with each other in order to develop trust, see things from multiple perspectives and use "gut instinct" well. Choose one and give examples of how this might happen.
3. Design a learning activity where young people could practise these complex project management leadership skills a) in primary school b) in junior high school c) in senior high school and d) at university.

The future of childhood

Would you buy a computer if you has to wait 12 or more years for the software programs to download before you could use them? And when you did, discover they are out of date and not much use.

Almost certainly not!

So why do we send our offspring to a place called school, and expect them to remain silent for the next 12 to 15 years of their lives as we fill up their "hard drives" with data rather than practice the ways of being in the world that will be useful to them, right now and later on. How to make decisions. How to design and make stuff. How to perform, speak in public, deliver a presentation, develop and use a thinking or decision method, inspire fellow citizens, contribute to the community, host a dinner party or conduct a conversation.

The world of the child is at the crossroads. The more we teach to the test, which involves ongoing cycles of drilling and testing in order to acheive certain standards, there is less and less room in the school day for the kind of learning experiences that really count. School becomes more and more like a factory and less like the communities and workplaces of the 21st Century.

Says Mitchel Resnik, of the Media Lab at Massachussets Institute of Technology, playful learning experiences were once the norm, but now:

"Kindergarten is undergoing a dramatic change. For nearly 200 years, since the first kindergarten opened in 1837, kindergarten has been a time for telling stories, building castles, drawing pictures, and learning to share. But that is starting to change. Today, more and more kindergarten children are spending time filling out phonics worksheets and memorizing math flashcards [5]. In short, kindergarten is becoming more like the rest of school. In my mind, exactly the opposite is needed: Instead of making kindergarten like the rest of school, we need to make the rest of school (indeed, the rest of life) more like kindergarten." 


School is a also convenient child minding service for busy mums and dads, and school is not something kids want to disappear just because it can be boring at times and you can't use the tools like computer, the mobile phone, video and audio producting tools, or games as much as you would like. Kids like school because it offers real 4D connection, at recess and lunch times.

Home is where many kids now live well into their twenties, as it takes much longer to prepare young people for the 21st Century world, so kids are delaying the day when they become fully responsible adults, capable housing themselves and cutting the ties with their parents. But enjoying the benefits of having a good time at the local bar and grill, or even bringing a girl or boyfriend home to warm their single or even double bed, with Mum and Dad's full knowledge is a kind of early adult form of play

There is also another anomaly. Play now permeates adulthood. Increasingly, business games are employed by management teams to explore complex scenarios. Simulations give us the opportunity to understand how to respond to unexpected events. Some businesses operate like games such as our friends and colleagues at Performance of a Lifetime in New York or the military, where complex manouvers are often played out under conditions which closely resemble multiplayer games.

There are also some uncanny similarities between children's collective play and new ways of learning autocatalytically, by setting up the initial conditions, and allowing the newly created knowledge to simply emerge, which is a feature of complex adaptive systems like to the Zing complex adaptive learning environment.

So here is a question sequence to explore the future of childhood in which collective play has a central role:

1. What is it like to be a child?
2. What aspects of being a child are valuable to carry on into life?
3. What is happening to children today that might be different to children of 100 years ago? e.g. making and influencing adult purchases.
4. Describe all the different ways that children play together, e.g. using sticks to represent people, animals and things.
5. What happens when children play together? How do they seem to learn from one another?
6. Describe all the different kinds of games that adult play. e.g. scrabble, cards
7. What can adults learn from the games they play. Choose one game and describe the kinds of learning that might be possible.
8. Describe all the different ways that business uses games, simulations, dilemmas, vignettes, improv etc.
9. What can/does business learn from games/simulations and how does this help leaders better understand growing complexity, uncertainty and ambiguity.
10. Describe a new kind of school, in which play, or playing collective games is the normal way of learning. What would teachers and students do? What would be on the curriculum of a school focused on play and games?
11. Describe a new kind of workplace, in which play, or playing collective games is the normal way of working.
12. Describe a new kind of community in which play or playing collective games is the new way of interacting.
13. What might the future of childhood be in the 21st Century, and how might it be different to the 20th century?