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Cognitive dissonance
It’s well known that many IT projects end up troubled in some way. Many of the problems with these
projects are never noticed until the project is approaching completion, and it’s possible that a phenomenon
that 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 brains
process information instead of any failings
on the part of the people involved with
implementing the projects.
The Standish Group, an American
consultancy that specialises in tracking
the success of IT projects, estimates
that most of them end up troubled in
some way. Some are cancelled before
completion. Others deliver only reduced
functionality, cost more than anticipated
or take longer than planned. [The trend is
in the right direction, however, with fewer
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failures happening as people get better at
managing these tricky projects].
As IT projects progress, many problems
seem to surface at the last minute, when
projects that seem to be on time and within
their budget strangely develop problems
just before their completion. This causes
schedule slippages and cost overruns as
well as headaches for everyone involved.
The cause of this phenomenon, as well
as 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 what
happens in our brains when we try to
simultaneously hold two contradictory
beliefs. Experiments have shown that
our beliefs can actually be altered due to
this effect. So if you believe one point of
view, but prepare and give a presentation
supporting an opposing point of view, it’s
likely that your opinion will actually be
altered by doing this as your brain tries to
reconcile the apparent contradiction of you
believing one thing but saying another.
A classic experiment by psychologists Leon
Festinger and James Carlsmith in 1959
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PROJECT MANAGEMenT
showed that people who had to describe a
tedious and onerous task in positive terms
actually changed their opinion of the task,
believing that it was not quite as bad as it
once seemed. Apparently their brains tried
to reconcile the fact that they shouldn’t be
lying about the task with their memory of
disliking doing it, and decided that if they
were describing it in a positive way then it
couldn’t have been quite as bad to begin
with. Even more curiously, if subjects
were paid enough, they didn’t change their
opinion of the task. They were apparently
able to understand that they were just
saying what they were paid to say instead
of actually coming to believe it.
So it seems that conflicting information
can confuse our brain and can actually
cause it to create new beliefs or modify
existing ones to eliminate any conflicts that
it encounters. It will also sometimes ignore
information that contradicts established
beliefs. Further studies have shown that
suffering from the effects of cognitive
dissonance seem to be independent of
gender and culture, so it may just be part
of the way our brains work. This means
that we probably can’t eliminate it, but we
can probably learn to understand it and to
compensate for its effects.
It may be the case that project managers
sometimes suffer from the effects of
cognitive dissonance, and this effect
may cause some of the problems that IT
projects experience. Project managers
certainly want to believe that the project
is going to be a success. This means that
when they’re presented with information
that contradicts this position, their brains
may create new facts in an attempt to
make the new information more consistent
with their belief that the project will be a
success. To others, this may look like the
project managers are just ignoring the fact
that their project is going off track, but it
may actually be more complicated than
that. The project manager’s brain may
actually have tricked them into believing
that their project is still on track, even
though the available information seems to
clearly contradict this.
This means that you may tell a project
manager that there’s an issue that’s
going to affect the cost or schedule
of their project and their brain may
simply not allow them to believe this
new information. They may not really
understand that the cost or schedule
of the project will be affected because
believing this conflicts with the
established belief that the project will be
on time and within its planned budget.
They may not realise that there is a
problem until it’s too late, and the cost and
schedule slippage has already occurred.
Regular reviews and demonstrations
of the progress of IT projects seem to
produce reality checks that make it clear
whether or not a project has problems.
But because such reviews are often done
close to the end of projects or the phases
that comprise them, many problems are
only acknowledged when it’s almost too
late to do anything about them. If the
inability to recognise problems until they’re
clearly demonstrated is due to cognitive
dissonance, even the most dedicated and
experienced project manager may be
susceptible to this problem.
A more realistic way to address this
potential problem is to do your best to
quantify everything and to track the progress
of projects with metrics that are easy to
verify. It may be easy for our brains to trick
us into believing things that aren’t true, but
if we insist on using verifiable quantitative
methods to support our claims of meeting
milestones on the way to completing a
project then we’re much less likely to fall
prey 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:
[email protected]
The original experiment by Festinger
and Carlsmith suggests that one way to
help project managers avoid the affects
of cognitive dissonance is to pay them
large salaries. If they’re paid enough
then they may be able to stay objective
about the progress of their projects. On
the other hand, it might be difficult to sell
this solution to upper management, so an
alternative is probably more useful!
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