A very interesting article in Nature that was picked up the WaPo earlier this month on how “Adding is favoured over subtracting in problem solving.“
So true, both at the individual and institutional level.
I am reminded of a story of someone’s mother who was taken to the hospital on death’s door. It turns out she had been over prescribed medications that started interacting in ways that were unforeseen. Each doctor proscribing a medication, more medication prescribed to treat symptoms of the other medicines, and so on. The happy outcome was that her doctor saw all the medications she was on and drastically reduced the number and dosage and as a consequence she had a near miraculous recovery.
This pattern of course exists in project development, particularly in the context of a weakly matrixed organization. Ideas are often added, removing them is a Herculean task. The vested interests in retaining a sub-project are often very strong to those stakeholders; whereas the costs of are distributed and the incentive to resist is lessor for other stakeholders. In effect it becomes the cost of doing business.
As a team leader responsible to design and implement projects, it is my firm belief that the monitoring the success of a project should be achievable in something less than 10 or 12 indicators.
One area where this comes up with some frequency is in Monitoring and Evaluation. I once worked on a project where I tried to articulate the 12 key indicators that would show progress on outputs and the first order outcomes – and with those, I argued, we can measure progress against what we said we would do and the immediate outcomes of those actions. Well, the initial M&E plan came back with over 400 indicators (disaggregated to be fair). No one, and I mean no one, is going to manage to that many indicators; arguably 12 is already too many.
The challenge was that within the overarching project objectives various sectors each have their own issues that each feels needs to appropriately reflected in the indicators. This results in the observation of the headline article – a runaway proliferation of indicators.
I’ll take my lumps now.