Author: George Pitagorsky

George Pitagorsky, integrates core disciplines and applies people centric systems and process thinking to achieve sustainable optimal performance. He is a coach, teacher and consultant. George authored The Zen Approach to Project Management, Managing Conflict and Managing Expectations and IIL’s PM Fundamentals™. He taught meditation at NY Insight Meditation Center for twenty-plus years and created the Conscious Living/Conscious Working and Wisdom in Relationships courses. Until recently, he worked as a CIO at the NYC Department of Education.

Managing Well When Your Project is Falling Apart

Written by George Pitagorsky on April 24, 2024. Posted in Articles.

In chaos, we can retreat alone to a safe place behind it all.

Safe and alone.

And from there respond as best as possible.

Project In-crisis

Imagine that you are in the last month (at least what you planned to be the last month) of a time-critical project and your principal team leader/designer walks out in a huff when the client decides she doesn’t like the design and changes her mind about some key product features. Further, she insists that her changes are trivial and should not affect the end date or cost.

You are in a state of severe anxiety, envisioning a serious blow to your bonus and career, since your upcoming review will hinge on how well you managed this project to the satisfaction of this important client.

What do you do?

Retreat

Of course, the quote above gives away the answer. “You retreat alone into a safe place behind it all.”

This answer opens some questions. What does “retreat” mean? Who has time for one? Where can you find such a place? How do you get there? What do you do once you’re there?

When faced with insurmountable forces, a wise general often chooses to retreat to live to fight another day. Retreating, in an orderly way, makes it possible to regain strength, and replan to renew the battle or go on to the next one.

In another sense, a retreat is a personal choice to take time to relax, reflect, and gain a fresh perspective. In effect, retreating is stepping back onto a platform from which you can think clearly and plan your next steps. A quiet, comfortable, secluded place is ideal, but not necessary.

Who Has Time for It?

You might be thinking, “Who has time to retreat?” The answer to that question is easy, you do! Make the time. Depending on the situation it might be only a minute, an hour, days, or weeks.

In our project in-crisis scenario painted above, the PM could take an hour or, better, a day to retreat, to calm down before doing anything else. Then with a clearer head, the PM and team can decide what to do next.

Where Can You Be Safe and Alone?

That place behind it all, like the eye of the storm, is not a physical location. Even if you could find a cabin or cave, your anxiety would be there with you. The quiet solitude could make it worse since you’d have more time for obsessive thinking and worry.

Retreat to a calm center that is always available, though often unseen, and unfiltered. It is not a specific physical place. It is a felt sense of presence, relaxed, objectively observing, accepting, and letting go. It is more of a feeling.

Benefits

Consider that thinking that there is no such thing as a calm center is just as much a belief as thinking there is such a thing. Consider taking on the positive belief as a hypothesis and seeing what happens.

The hypothesis is that by finding your peaceful “retreat place” within, you cultivate the ability to become increasingly responsive and less reactive. And the more responsive you are, the better your performance. The better your performance, the greater the probability of success.

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How You Get There: The Peaceful Warrior’s Path

While some have it naturally, for many, it takes courage and patient skillful effort to overcome reactivity and cultivate responsiveness when faced with emotional and intellectual challenges. The effort applies concepts and techniques to remove the obstacles to responsiveness.

Concepts, for example, models like servant leadership, process awareness, and systems thinking, address mindset. Mindset is the way we think, feel, and believe. Your mindset affects your performance and emotions.

The techniques include meditation, breath awareness and control, and any exercise that combines mindful self-awareness and physical health. It might be running, lifting weights, walking, or playing a sport while using the activity to hone your mindfulness and self-awareness.

Courage is needed to confront deeply held beliefs and uncertainty and to accept the discomfort of challenging physical sensations and emotions. Patient persistence is needed because it is hard to change habits and it takes time and practice. Target perfection and accept imperfection as part of an ongoing improvement process.

The good news is that as the concepts and techniques are contemplated, practiced, and integrated, it becomes easier to accept and let go, it becomes your natural way of being.

What Do You Do Once You’re There?

This “place”, the calm center, we refer to is a felt sense, a dynamic state of mind, in which you are objectively observing, relaxed, energized, making conscious choices, and performing optimally. “There” refers to this state of mind, some refer to it as Flow, or being in the Zone.

From there, the PM and his team would analyze the situation and revise the plan to reflect reality. They would consider the impact of this project running late on other projects or programs. They would consider how best to communicate the results to clients and sponsors and manage expectations. The PM may determine if the team lead who quit might come back to finish the project.

Anxiety, fear of failure, and fear of confronting superiors with unwelcome news contribute to overly optimistic plans. These create more stress and anxiety later. The skillful manager retreats, stepping back into the calm at the eye of the storm, and plans with objective clarity while managing his emotions and expectations, and the emotions and expectations of the team and all the other stakeholders.

The Process is Its Own Reward

In my most recent book, The Peaceful Warrior’s Path: Optimal Wellness through Self-aware Living, I quote Amelia Earhart:

“The most difficult thing is the decision to act; the rest is merely tenacity . . .

You can act to change and control your life;

and the procedure, the process, is its own reward.”[1]

The procedure and process she refers to is the application of the concepts and techniques that cultivate your ability to optimally manage whatever comes. The reward is priceless, it is the increasing self-confidence that leads to acceptance and letting go into optimal performance and wellness.

[1] Pitagorsky, George, The Peaceful Warrior’s Path: Optimal Wellness through Self-aware Living, 2023, Self-Aware living, p.1

Collaborative Decision Making

Written by George Pitagorsky on April 17, 2024. Posted in Articles.

Meditation teacher Tejaniya advised, “Never try to force an issue. Just acknowledge, accept, and keep observing until things unfold naturally.”

This might be fine when there is all the time in the world for the issue to be resolved, but from a project management perspective, it sounds far too passive an approach.

However, when you consider what happens when you force an issue by using your power as a manager or a majority in a decision-making group, there may be some wisdom in acknowledging, accepting, and observing things unfold naturally.

Scenario

In a program to improve the way a complex organization operated, a narrow majority of the Program Steering Group that was responsible for making decisions regarding which of several projects was to be done and in what order decided by a slim majority to authorize a project to renovate a process in one department.

They hired a design consultant and created a Design Team to provide feedback regarding the design. The Design Team reflected on the decision and was influenced by some of the minority members of the program steering group. They came back to the steering group with their unanimous opinion that the chosen project was not the best one to take on first, provided their reasoning, and called for the steering group to provide an overall plan that identified all the projects that would be part of the program, a capital financial plan, and an overall architecture before deciding on which project would be done first.

The steering group pushed back using their authority. They said that the Design Team was asked to give feedback on the design and not question the steering group’s decision. The steering group forced the issue.

The Design Team grumbled, but since they reported to the members of the Program Steering Group were left with no choice but to quit or comply, so they chose to comply.

The result was, as the Design Team predicted, a well-designed process with supporting systems that within a few years needed to be significantly changed, at great cost to fit with the other processes and systems that emerged as part of the overall renovation program. The resulting architecture resembled a patchwork – “something composed of miscellaneous parts; hodgepodge.”[1]

Over time, system maintenance was a nightmare. Further, some useful renovations were not included in the program because avoidable costs of initial projects used up the program’s budget.

The Consequences of Forcing an Issue

Here we see that forcing a decision led to the postponement of due diligence. Not doing capital planning and architectural design led to avoidable consequences, as pointed out in my article The Karma of Postponing Due Diligence[2]. And there are other consequences of forcing an issue, for example, disgruntled staff, and loss of respect for the decision-makers.

A Path Forward

So what can we do? As leaders in positions of power, we can step back and assess our decisions in the light of feedback and conflicting ideas. We can apply emotional and social intelligence along with wise decision-making, and servant leadership concepts.

Emotional intelligence comes into play when the decision-makers apply self-awareness to see why they find it necessary to force an issue. Is it because they are emotionally attached to their decision or to their power? With social intelligence, they can assess the impact of their use of authority on their staff, superiors, and peers.

As wise decision-makers, they recognize the need to look at the issue from multiple perspectives – long and short-term impacts, financial and quality consequences, and more. Servant leadership involves respect for others and their opinions and the positive impact of helping followers become wise decision-makers.

In a recent article[3] the author points out “the value of working with those with whom we disagree.” The author relates how Dr. Daniel Kahneman, who explored judgment and decision-making and how easily people become less than rational when making decisions, “experienced real joy working with others to discover the truth, even if he learned that he was wrong (something that often delighted him).” Kahneman favored “adversarial collaboration.”

When adversaries work together, they face the issue rather than each other. This requires acknowledging that one can be all wrong or half wrong and that the other party or parties may be right or half right, whether they are peers, superiors, or subordinates.

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Don’t Force an Issue

Let’s return to Tejaniya’s advice, “Never try to force an issue. Just acknowledge, accept, and keep observing until things unfold naturally.”

I try never to say never. There are times as a manager that we will choose to use authority to force a decision. But that is a last resort, for example when faced with a tight deadline leaving no time for further dialogue. Acknowledging, accepting, and observing until things unfold naturally is a superior way of operating. But only when we have a clear sense of what that means.

Acknowledging, accepting, and observing are active, not passive. Acknowledge and accept that there are differences of opinion and different positions. Observe your own and the other parties’ positions and behavior. Listening to content and tone is part of observing as is seeing others’ body language and facial expressions and observing your own.

Open your mind to the possibility that your position is not the best or only effective alternative. This is part of accepting. You let go of your attachment to having it your way (even if your way is not the best way).

Then clarify, present your view, and consider that to be part of what is unfolding naturally. You are letting go of your position and allowing the right expression of your knowledge and experience for the situation. You seek to understand the needs and wants, facts and opinions.

In the example from the article cited above, Professor Kahneman and his adversary found through a collaborative effort that they were both partially right and partially wrong. They came to a resolution that they could not have reached working on their own.

Never say Never

What if your opponent is closed to a collaborative approach? Then you acknowledge and accept the reality that collaboration is no longer possible and naturally force the issue (if you have the power to do so.) When you do, if you have been open-minded, asked the right questions, and objectively considered the answers, your decision might not be the same one you made before you tried to collaborate.

[1] Merriam Webster https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/patchwork.

[2] https://www.projecttimes.com/articles/the-karma-of-postponing-due-diligence/

[3] The Nobel Winner Who Liked to Collaborate With His Adversaries https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/01/opinion/nobel-daniel-kahneman-collaboration.html

Team Building: A Cross-Cultural Perspective

Written by George Pitagorsky on April 9, 2024. Posted in Articles.

These days many, if not all, of our projects are performed by cross-cultural teams. Not only do members come from different national and ethnic cultures, but they come from cultures based on mindset (for example progressive and conservative, woke and anti-woke), generational attributes, socio-political influences, corporate environments, and more.

Teams are vehicles for getting things done. When people come together to accomplish objectives – whether to win a game or perform a project – having an understanding among the team members regarding their objectives and the way they will work together is critical to success.

What Culture Is

“Culture is often described through Professor Geert Hofstede’s definition: The programming of the human mind by which one group of people distinguishes itself from another group – the set of shared beliefs, values, and norms that distinguish one group of people from another. As global organisations become increasingly diverse, understanding and managing cultural differences has become a critical competency for business leaders.”[1]

In human societies, culture is a concept that groups people based on shared knowledge, beliefs, values, and practices. A culture includes social norms, habits, customs, institutions, behaviors, beliefs, arts, laws, and more. We have many overlapping cultures – for example, corporate, regional, national, ethnic, generational, and religious. In teams, there are diverse cultural norms including those around cleanliness and neatness, how close people stand when talking, punctuality, and styles of dress.

Cultures are dynamic. They change as people’s needs change and as one culture is influenced by another. New cultures evolve out of this dynamic change process. Each team has a culture. Some are consciously created and understood, others, not so much.

Why Team Cultures are Important

Our culture influences our mindset with its beliefs, biases, and values as well as the way we work, play, dress, relate to one another, and communicate. The more that team members understand one another and agree upon values, goals, objectives, and communication and collaboration norms, the more team effectiveness increases.

What are the differences in behavior that get in the way of your team’s optimal performance? Are they caused by cultural differences?

“Anthropologists consider that world cultures vary along five consistent dimensions, which include collectivism versus individualism, and cultural preference for uncertainty avoidance. The extent to which cultures vary for these different dimensions can lead to very different expectations when it comes to interpersonal relationships and business communication.”[2]

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If some people have a cultural norm of rigidly adhering to punctuality and others are more accepting of a looser adherence, conflict is likely. For example, a U. S. employee visiting his Scandinavian company’s home office was shocked and insulted when he was not permitted to enter a meeting to which he was five minutes late. The cultural norm in that company’s home office was that if you were not on time, then don’t come at all. In the U. S. division coming in a few minutes late was acceptable. The American’s lateness influenced the local colleagues’ opinion of him and made integrating him into the team more difficult.

In another example, there may be a clash between team members from a culture that values assertiveness and tolerates some abrasiveness and those from cultures that view conflict and abrasive language as undesirable. When an assertive team member puts forth an idea, she might expect others to bring up conflicting ideas or criticisms. When they don’t assert their opinions, thinking of doing so as being rude or disrespectful, the assertive person, not understanding the cultural norm in play, may take silence as agreement. The result would be adopting a less-than-effective idea, creating a design or plan deficiency.

A project manager from a culture that avoids uncertainty will tend to strictly adhere to detailed structured plans and take fewer risks out of fear of failure. This can frustrate team members who have a higher tolerance for ambiguity and seek to innovate, take a more agile approach, and change the plan to obtain more creative outcomes.

What We Can Do

Cultural consciousness and emotional/social intelligence can avoid the negative impact of cultural differences. Cultural consciousness means being mindfully aware of culture as a force in team performance, of the cultural attributes of team members, of the ability to transcend cultural conditioning, and of the tendency to think one’s culture is better than others. Emotional/social intelligence means having the capacity to be aware of one’s feelings, able to manage one’s behavior and be sensitive to the feelings and behaviors of others. As individuals, we can choose to be adaptive to our current situation rather than being limited by cultural norms that are no longer relevant or useful.

As project managers, we can build a team culture that respects the cultural backgrounds of team members while cultivating an understanding of how to behave in a way that leads to the team’s success. For example, when it comes to decision-making, adopting an approach like the Six Hats model makes it a norm to look at an idea critically and from multiple perspectives opens the door to a critical analysis of the idea. Combine that with the awareness that avoiding conflict robs the team of useful information, and that exhibiting abrasive speech patterns and behavior may be taken as a sign of weakness, a personal attack causing another to back off or fire back to escalate a conflict and redirect the process away from the idea content.

Creating and sustaining effective teams requires cross-cultural awareness training to promote mutual understanding and respect, effective communication processes, and team-building activities to speed up the movement from forming to norming without much storming, to promote optimal performing.

Make sure that team members can fully express their opinions and needs. Consciously agree upon common values and goals to achieve a team culture that integrates the multiple cultures of its members.

We build a team, and once it’s built, we sustain it throughout its life. Like any structure, if we build it well, sustaining it is easy. However, it takes ongoing mindful awareness and patient effort to overcome the obstacles presented by cultural differences and turn them into strengths.

[1] https://www.hofstede-insights.com/intercultural-management

[2] https://toppandigital.com/us/blog-us/saying-no-how-conflict-avoidance-varies-between-cultures/#:~:text=Cultures%20such%20as%20the%20USA,as%20Thailand%2C%20Japan%20and%20China.

The Karma of Postponing Due Diligence

Written by George Pitagorsky on March 20, 2024. Posted in Articles.

There is a trade-off between doing work now and postponing it until you are forced to do it.

The law of karma says that what you do and don’t do causes a ripple effect. So, be careful to avoid the unwanted consequences of putting off review and assessment, risk management, planning, project administration, and resource management work.

Due Diligence

Due diligence is the opposite of negligence. In finance, project, and acquisition management, it is the effort to collect, analyze, and use data to make decisions. Due diligence is the work to collect, assess, prevent, mitigate, and account. In project management, it is the process of deciding whether to pursue or pass on a project based on a risk-reward assessment. It seeks to determine if the project is feasible, legal, ethical, and profitable. From a project and process management view, add planning, regular maintenance, and quality management to the definition of due diligence.

Bypass due diligence and the risk of failure goes way up.

Accounting and Due Diligence

Doing my tax accounting reminded me of the importance of the accounting part of due diligence and the understanding that not doing accounting and regular status reporting makes the rest of due diligence far more difficult than it needs to be.

Every year I resolve to take the time to clean up my data and set things in place for a far easier next year. But it is already March and I’d have to spend even more hours dealing with this ‘stuff’ when I have many other things to do to catch up for all the time I spent on the taxes. Then because I have so much else to do, I do not take the time to regularly do the accounting that would make taxes easy, even if not pleasant.

I postpone the effort and each year I repeat the pain.

Project Management

For one reason or another, we often put off doing unexciting and easily postponed chores.

With the pressure to “act now” and get our projects off the ground, we often find that risk-reward decision-making is given only cursory attention or bypassed altogether. Amid a dynamic complex project with tight deadlines, limited resources, and “problems” the only thing that matters is getting the work done, now. Anything else is a distraction.

This kind of heads-down, undistracted, focused work on a project can be useful. However, if you are working without regularly stepping back, you and your organization will suffer. If you think and act as if doing status reports, risk management, communication, human caretaking, and project accounting are distractions, think again.

Project performance includes Project management. Due diligence during the project means doing:

project accounting – cost and effort tracking, issue logs, status reports
regular quality assurance/process-focused meetings
risk management
quality control
communication
human caretaking (stakeholder management)

Above the project level, in the higher-order process, due diligence means:

process management – making sure the process, methodology, standards, templates, roles, and responsibilities are as best as they can be
portfolio management – making sure that the right projects are being initiated and realistically scheduled to avoid overwhelming resources and taking on projects that are likely to be disappointing.

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The Higher-order Process

When we refer to the project level and above, we recognize that projects are being performed within a higher-order process, which includes process and portfolio management, environmental conditions, and resource management. Both the project and higher levels are important, and they are interrelated. However, given the nature of organizations with short-sighted priorities, the higher-order process is often overlooked.

The higher-order processes are complex and operate in multiple dimensions such as portfolio management occurring in the context of organizational strategy, market conditions, regulatory issues, and more. The benefits and costs of doing and not doing due diligence at this level are not immediately realized. They make themselves known when something goes wrong, and the problem cannot be explained by and resolved at the project level.

For example, your project resources may be taken away and reassigned to another project causing your project to be delayed. If senior stakeholders are ok with the delay because it was factored into their decision to remove the resources, then there is no problem. But if this happens frequently across multiple projects it is a sign that the project portfolio may not be being effectively managed.

If you do not take the time to evaluate the legal, budgetary, risks, and reward factors of a project, the consequences are not felt until the project fails or a regulatory body steps in to put the brakes on. If project performers are constantly complaining about having to do useless work on administrative tasks, it may be a sign that procedures and templates need to be reviewed and repaired, performers need to be better trained, or that the wrong methodology approach is being used.

Fine-tuning or more radically changing the higher-order process affects the quality of individual project performance.

Project-level Due Diligence

Accounting within each project is part of project management due diligence. Every team member, not just the project manager, must allocate time and focus attention on tasks that may seem to be distractions from the so-called “real work.”

Project accounting is done to satisfy regulatory and administrative needs, for example, knowing how money has been spent and resources used. In addition, stakeholders want to know what is going on and how it is affecting their expectations. Will the project be on time and budget? What events have occurred that can get in the way?

But that’s not the only reason. Project accounting sets the stage for due diligence at a higher level. It leaves an audit trail with the data needed to refine portfolio management decision-making and methodology assessment. With project-level reporting comes the ability to look back at what happened to learn from it. Hindsight is not 20-20 unless there is a record to review. Memories are imperfect. How will the data from this project influence decision-making at a higher level?

Commitment and Follow-Through

The bottom line is to build due diligence activities into work plans and commit to following through with effective portfolio management decision-making, raising the consciousness of stakeholders, and ongoing refinement of the project performance approach.

Working Hard, But Not Too Hard!

Written by George Pitagorsky on February 28, 2024. Posted in Articles.

Working hard is applying a high level of effort, being consistently focused, productive and effective, applying emotional, physical, and intellectual energy. Working hard is rewarding, it leads to personal and organizational success.

Some people say, “Work smarter, not harder.” But working hard is not the opposite of working smart. The two go together. Working smart makes working hard more effective. Working hard without working smart leads to working too hard.

Working “too hard” causes fatigue and burn out, it reduces performance, challenges relationships, creates a cycle of emotional reactions like anger and depression. Challenging work becomes too hard when it can’t be sustained. Sustained challenging work, physical or mental, requires sufficient reward, rest, relaxation, and recovery.

Subjectivity

What does it mean to work “too hard”? With two people doing the same work, one might find it too hard and the other too easy.

Some years ago, I managed a project that had a tight time deadline (don’t they all?). We were a core team of six people including myself, all in our late 20’s to early 30’s. For the last month of the project, we were working late into the night, coming in early in the morning, and occasionally doing all night work sessions. We had pretty much cut off our social and family connections for the duration. The work was engaging, state of the art, and creative. The reward was both financially, emotionally, and intellectually rewarding. Team members had bonded, and it often felt as if we were reading one another’s thoughts. We were in Flow. When the project ended, we were both ready for a rest and sad that it was over.

Some family members and friends thought we were working too hard. For us it was a thrilling ride. It’s very subjective. Observers may or may not have an accurate perception of how hard a worker is working in any role as a performer, manager, or executive.

Objective Criteria

We can bring some useful objectivity to the question of what working too hard means by defining the characteristic conditions of “too hard”, to overwork, really means.

Working too hard means there is imbalance among the factors – hours worked, rest and recovery, task complexity, competency, work environment, relationships, mental attitude, and physical condition.

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Symptoms

Overwork is a principal cause of burnout. In my article Burnout: What It Is and How to Avoid it,[1] I identified the symptoms of – “exhaustion, disengagement, and reduced effectiveness.

Exhaustion is loss of energy and fatigue. It occurs when there is too much stress caused by unhealthy performance demands (chronic overwork). It can be a short-term experience following an intensive physical, emotional, or mental activity. Short-term exhaustion can be treated by moderating performance demands and taking rest and recovery time. If it goes untreated and becomes chronic, burnout follows.
Disengagement is affected by a sense of not being cared for by leadership and of the futility of the work. People lose a psychological connection to their work. Involvement and enthusiasm suffer. Performers, whether executives, managers, or staff, just put in their time instead of being actively engaged in their work. self-worth suffers. They become cynical and either engage in unnecessary conflict or withdraw to avoid engaging in meaningful debates.
Reduced effectiveness is tied to both exhaustion and lack of engagement. With tiredness, less involvement and enthusiasm, performers become less productive and less effective. That results in greater stress as performance goals become more difficult to achieve. Greater stress feeds exhaustion and lack of engagement.”

For observers, becoming disengaged with friends and family is perceived as a symptom of overwork. It may be, depending on how persistent it is, and whether overwork is the cause or work is being used as an escape from challenging relationships.

Symptoms are the most objective criteria available. It is up to each of us to be aware of our feelings and energy levels to decide if we are experiencing the symptoms of overwork.

Self-awareness

“Self-awareness is the ability to “step back” and observe yourself objectively to know your behavior, motivations, feelings, values, and desires. It is knowing your personality and the way you display it in your life.”[2]

Your self-awareness enables you to see whether you are working too hard and if you are, why you are doing it.

Doing Something About It

You can do three things about working too hard. 1) You can avoid it, 2) you can correct the imbalance among hours worked, rest and recovery, task complexity, competency, work environment, relationships, mental attitude, and physical condition to stop doing it, or 3) you can continue and suffer the consequences.

You avoid it by establishing a healthy work-life balance. You stop it by identifying the imbalance and correcting it by adjusting your attitude and behavior.

For example, you can balance rest and recovery with working on challenging work for long hours, and intensively. That kind of work is often necessary and can be sustained if there is time for rest and recovery.

A supportive work environment, with space for quiet time, and workspaces designed for the kind of work being performed to provide comfort and ease enables breaks and eliminates unnecessary stress.

Healthy relationships, including the ability to manage conflict and expectations, remove unnecessary stress and enable intensive effort.

Mental attitude is a key factor. If you believe you are working to hard, you will act as if you were. If you believe that you are working hard and are ok with it, you will be most effective.

If your personal situation is creating the imbalance because of workaholism or anxiety about not working hard enough, you are faced with the task of addressing these causes.

If your work situation does not give you the ability to improve imbalance, you are faced with the challenge of making the changes that will protect your health and effectiveness. That may mean taking the risks of standing up to your boss and changing jobs.

[1] https://www.projecttimes.com/articles/burnout-what-it-is-and-how-to-avoid-it/

[2] Pitagorsky, George, “Self-Awareness a Critical Capability for Project Managers”, https://www.projecttimes.com/articles/self-awareness-a-critical-capability-for-project-managers-d23/