Episode 558: Why Smart Organizations Keep Doing Dumb Things (Premium Preview)

The Project Management Podcast

Cornelius Fichtner and Sara Gallagher explore the paradox of why highly intelligent organizations continue to make repetitive, poor decisions. The

Key takeaways

• Sara Gallagher suggests that in unpredictable environments, decisions should be measured by how 'defensible' they are against established criteria rather than their predictability.
• The integration of AI is shifting the project manager's role from simple coordination to acting as a business analyst and manager of autonomous agents.

Main topics

• Organizational decision-making
• Impact of Artificial Intelligence on PM roles

Notable quotes

Why do smart organizations keep doing dumb things?

Conclusion

The episode serves as a call to action for project managers to move be

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) In this premium episode, we look at more dumb stuff, including AI. Speaker 1 (0:09) Hello and welcome back to the Project Management Podcast at pm-podcast.com. I'm Cornelius Fichtner and thank you so much for stopping by. This is the preview of our premium episode number 558 where Sarah Gallagher joins me once again. Sarah, as you may remember, is president of the Persimmon Group and the creator of the Big Dumb Questions newsletter. And today we're asking... One particularly big question. Why do smart organizations keep doing dumb things? Because every organization has smart, experienced, and well-intentioned people. And yet, somehow, we still make decisions that take too long, promote the wrong people, struggle with change, lose value during product handoff, and repeat mistakes that everyone involved can... already see coming. Sarah and I, we look at why that happens from three different angles. First, we look at the system itself and how organizations actually make decisions. Then we turn to human behavior, including confidence versus competence and why motivated teams still resist change. And then finally, we put us, the project managers, right in the middle of all of it, including what AI may mean for our role or authority and the future of project management. If you are already a premium subscriber, then you can access the full episode through your subscription in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or Supercast. And if you are not yet a premium subscriber, then you can learn more about premium access and what's included by visiting pm-podcast.com slash premium. And now, here is a short preview of the conversation. So, every organization has smart people. Educated, experienced, well-intentioned smart people. And yet, those same organizations keep making the same dumb mistakes. I Speaker 2 (2:21) have completely organized, reorganized the way that I do my work. around what ai's capabilities are and even like all in on cloud code and all the all this i'm a non-technical person but i've just fully become ai pilled ai is different the capability gets rolled out and then all of a sudden it's like everybody overnight became two things one the business analyst over their own job we have to build process flows specify the work build requirements well enough to tell AI how to do something. And then add agents in, we've now all become managers too. We've got