I prefer John Steinbeck's version: "Power does not corrupt. Fear corrupts - perhaps the fear of the loss of power". (Hat tip to goodreads.com). Many of the odd behaviors standing in the way of effective governance are really all about people being afraid of losing power.
Many appointed (vs. professional) project managers people resist governance initiatives because they think it imposes a lot of extra burden on them - decision papers, approval boards and so on, for no apparent value. That can be true, but the reality is that in codifying governance process, the real people being constrained are those who were until then exercising unaccountable power in the course of making decisions.
In very few organizations are the executives and senior managers actually stupid. What they do is what works for them. That may appear counter-productive for you, but that's because you are on the wrong side of the value chain. Your ideas may be theoretically sound, and they may even be objectively better for the country as a whole of even for the stockholders of that company; but that isn't what has gotten these top managers into the positions that they are in. And you may rest assured that they will use every trick in the book to avoid letting your new-fangled ivory-tower scheme make any inroads on something that has benefited them very well. The fear of losing power will motivate them pretty strongly. The managers most likely to resist governance are unfortunately those who could most benefit from it: the weak managers who, unsure of their own skills or knowledge base, avoid any possible exposure of weakness and see any predictable process as an infringement on their sovereign rights.
What happens in an organization that appear to lack governance? (Actually it has governance, it just is not codified. And it is ugly. But things happen somehow). If no decision is recorded, then nobody in authority can be held responsible (you can be sure, however, that the lower level line manager will take the fall when things go too far wrong). If no decision is taken in public, and/or no decision is final, then managers never have to tell anybody "no", never have to account for any decisions, and never have to deal with the consequences of allocating the same funds two or three times over. Consistently the result is the same. Unrealistic promises, no priorities, and nothing ever gets done even in part before being shoved aside for the latest crisis. The organization spirals from decline to chaos to implosion. Then some outside auditor cleaning up the mess says: "What you need is to implement some project management best practices". Without a change in the organization's culture, this will simply kick off another identical cycle.
Project and program managers often say they are frustrated by an organizational inability to get anything done because it is never clear who has been tasked to do what. Surely this is an easy fix? The head of the organization (or a board) needs to set and enforce priorities; how hard would that be? Since so many organizations are having trouble with that, evidently it is quite hard. It requires the executives to be accountable for decisions they make (never a secure route to the top). But if there is enough squawking about actual impacts of indecision, changes may well ensure. The interesting thing is that all too often, the squawking can be just for show. In all too many of the organizations in which project and program managers bemoan the lack of governance, we find some of these events happening:
- Program managers drop into the vice-president's office to get some funding out of the apparently bottomless budgetary grab-bag for yet another project
- Project managers routinely overshoot project dates and budget (again reaching into the miraculous bag to pay for the overruns). Actually delivery dates and costs are not even tracked in any material way.
- Project managers do nothing about resource availability conflict. After a while they just extend out their completion forecasts. Actually nobody is really checking on those anyway.
Now one can argue that at some point a PM simply becomes tired of fighting the battle, and likely finds it to be career-threatening. Maybe it is better just to do what seems to work.
But it is possible that the situation is not as bleak as you might think. I repeat: most executives are not stupid. They are indeed largely political animals, but it also means that they are probably compulsively competitive, even where there is nothing to compete about. They are capable of discerning that everything they do turns into a disaster, even if they are pretty good at papering that fact over, and they'd rather have an actual success than have to spend time always papering over failures. If a PM has the facts, and does a decent job of the analysis, it should be very possible to take these simple steps:
- Report pending resource contentions
- Report other issues that the PM cannot solve without higher-level assistance
- Know what the impacts are of not getting a decision (and by when)
- Have some ideas as to what an effective relief action might be. Whining doesn't solve anything.
This has worked for me in some pretty dysfunctional places, and it could work for you. Of course in the fifth year of the longest non-recovery in history, PMs may be reluctant to stick their necks out by offering suggestions that their projects are in less than stellar conditions, particularly if the leadership seems so obtuse that they might not notice this themselves for months or years. If that's your situation, then a PM's gotta do what a PM's gotta do. I get that. Been there, done that. Keep cashing the paycheck, but don't blame your frustration on a broken governance process if you're the one helping it stay broken.
Fear of losing power (or losing your job) corrupts absolutely.
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