The Delivery Podcast

Storytelling in the Age of AI

Projects are all about storytelling; enabling us to make sense of the world around us and to organise socially to change it. Brin Hodgskiss, Emer O'Donovan and Donnie MacNicol explain exactly how and why stories are significant in project delivery and how the advent of AI will make human storytelling even more important in the future. In a wide-ranging discussion, they explain:
the critical skill of managing the narrative of your project
how storytelling creates extraordinary levels of empathy and rapport between narrator and listener 
why it is important to make sure you tell the story people need to hear, rather than the one they necessarily want to hear
the meaning and value of internal storytelling and how by changing your perspective, you change your story and will change your project
Along the way, they offer some powerful stories of their own of how AI and storytelling are being used together in large infrastructure projects, the transformation of the NHS, and the development of the next generation of music products such as the Spotify virtual DJ.

Predictions, Performance and People: Three Perspectives on Project Data and Analytics

Three very different applications of data and analytics feature in this podcast episode. James Lea from Project Science talks about predictive analytics, Sarah Crawley from Symterra explores progress reporting and performance, and Donnie MacNicol of Team Animation introduces the concept of human-centric data. 
The common themes in each approach are the growing democratization of data; with data and information available to and for the benefit of delivery teams, who are increasingly enabled and engaged by the opportunity to query the data for themselves. 
Along with some brilliant personal stories, our three speakers cover topics as wide-ranging as:
- project dashboards and data visualization
- the pressure for open data standards
- the need for engagement and buy-in across the organization
- the politics of truth and the irrationality of single fixed values in estimates
- the emerging new forms of interaction with and response to data
Project Science www.projectscience.co.uk 
Symterra www.symterra.co.uk
Team Animation www.teamanimation.co.uk 

Making the Implicit Explicit

How do the human aspects of decision making play out in practice in the complex and uncertain environment of large projects? What are the biases (cognitive, gender, status and so on) which undermine our best attempts to work together collaboratively and to deliver challenging outcomes?
Ruth Murray-Webster, IJ Samuel and Mary Gregory explore the reality of bias, in all its forms and talk candidly about the impact on them, their careers and on projects and the organisations that undertake them.
Learn about:
- the importance of paying attention and being willing to challenge;
- the value of courageous conversations;
- what we might learn from the lessons of safety culture in challenging bias;
- what we should be measuring to help make the implicit explicit in everything we do;
- how we can move the dial on bias in every project and every organisation.
The episode concludes with a reminder of the positive side of bias, the contributors favourite, personal heuristics that they use all the time to help ground what they are doing.
 

The Resilience Revolution

Resilience is now recognised as one of the defining requirements of any big project, whether that is expressed in terms of the infrastructure asset, the organisation or system behind the project, or the network of individuals that make up the project delivery team and the wider stakeholders.
Our three contributors to the Delivery Podcast episode on this theme (Kristen MacAskill, Associate Professor at the University of Cambridge; Elmar Kutsch, Associate Professor in Risk Management at Cranfield School of Management; and Donnie MacNicol of Team Animation), take us on a guided tour of this big and often slippery subject, including:
how to establish the level of robustness we'd like, within a budget we can afford
prioritizing your most critical assets and planning for safe levels of failure
the paradox we face when trying to establish system redundancies
the dangers of not looking beyond our own routines and habits
the meaning of resilience for an individual
balancing the tension between an approach that is defensive vs one that is progressive, and of favouring consistency against flexibility
what kind of people you need when resilience is critical
the relationship between project management and resilience
the role and value of natural systems
the role of improvisation in managing the unexpected
and introduce us to a rich variety of frameworks and models to help our understanding, such as:
the four R's of infrastructure reliance;
The 4X4 matrix of consistency vs flexibility and progressive vs defensive Organizational Resilience: A summary of academic evidence, business insights and new thinking (cranfield.ac.uk)
the Shenhar/Dvir Diamond Model of project complexity Project Type Profiling Based on the Ideal Company Project (pmi.org)
the Cynefin Framework About - Cynefin Framework - The Cynefin Co
before closing with a call to arms for a Resilience Revolution.

Learning Just-in-Time: the Antidote to Complexity and Uncertainty

What's the one thing that can secure you and everything you are working on from the worst that change and uncertainty can throw at you? It's got to be learning and just-in-time learning at that.
The team behind QUBE: Professor Eddie Obeng, Tammy Watchorn and David Lomas explain why 'in the world after midnight', learning socially, in-the-moment and applying the learning as you go is as much a part of the skillset for project delivery as any of the more traditional processes.
In this episode, you'll discover:
what happens to most things you teach people and why learning is out of synch in a context where your organisation's capacity to learn has been overtaken by the speed of change
what does just-in-time learning look like in the real world and how does it change everything else you do too?
how this approach enables you to de-risk your projects, improve outcomes, productivity and your chances of success
the discipline and practice of the learning dojo and the impact this approach has had on the NHS
what is AI and machine intelligence and why it isn't an effective alternative to personal learning 
and much more.
Check out:
- the Dojo on QUBE
- the Change Ninja 
 

The Crisis of Governance and the End of Certainty

For our second episode, we've turned our focus onto the governance of big projects; the set of rules that we use to help us decide which strategy to adopt in the first place and then, having adopted it, that frame how we should behave collaboratively to deliver it.
Terry Cooke-Davies opens with a challenge around the 'crisis of governance', the seeds of which he can trace back to enlightenment thinking. Our expert panel, David Hancock (Cabinet Office) , Liz Pattison (Lexica) and Greg Krawczyk (APM Governance SiG), then offer their own take on the issues, encouraged and facilitated by our podcast hosts, Donnie MacNicol and Jonathan Norman.
Fittingly for such a BIG subject, our conversation is very wide ranging, taking in everything from the problems created by:
addressing leadership and management as two discrete and separate elements rather than as two sides of the same coin; 
the persistence that we can bring certainty to delivery, despite all the evidence to the contrary
a failure to adopt delivery models that are appropriate for the type of project we are engaged with
To the possible solutions:
building Bayesian reasoning into our governance processes
honestly recognising and accommodating the range of possible costs and time 
adopting an approach to decision-making that at least attempts at a broad consensus
recognising that this is not simply a problem of governance and that the solution needs to be far broader and more imaginative than simply 'tightening the rules'

Reframing Major Projects (And Their Delivery)

What if we looked at major projects as grand experiments, or considered managing change as harnessing a force of nature, or thought of project managers as theatre directors, foresters or even, minecrafters. 
In this first ever episode, five leading thinkers: Julie Black (Director of Missions and Capability at the UK Space Agency), Donnie MacNicol (owner of Team Animation and founder of the Delivery Club), Helen Bevan (Strategic Health Advisor for NHS Horizons), Jo Lucas (co-founder of Co-cre8), and Andy Murray (Executive Director of the Major Projects Association) share five metaphors to help reframe major projects and how we deliver them. 
"Allow the tide of thinking to take place around you as only then can you effect real change."
This is an episode about learning, emergence, complex environments, human systems, experimentation ... and Trojan mice.