An ingrained bias in process management is the frequent overemphasis on the social side: the stakeholders and actors, their interests, what they should do and when, and how to align them towards common goals and joint products. While this side of management is obviously significant, it also entails the danger of black boxes, formed out of generic, vague assumptions and expectations. We roughly know the capacities and remit of each participant in a project, so we feel disinclined to specify their contributions to the project or the connections between contributions in detail. Instead, we assume that everyone will do their bit and problems will be solved automatically, perhaps even before we realize their existence.
However, as the dual-process theory explains, this view is a highly suspect product of Type 1 thinking. The consequences of uncontrollable black boxes and undefined connections can be quite grave. A manager can always adopt a laissez-faire attitude and wait for crises to emerge in a project, in the knowledge that crises trigger action. Unfortunately, not all problems qualify as crises. In many cases, failure is the sum of many smaller problems that remain systematically unsolved (a characteristic malaise in AECO). But even when the problems are big enough for the crisis to be recognized, it may be too late for effective and economic solutions (as the sunk- costs fallacy indicates). The obvious solution is to structure processes clearly and consistently as a sequence of specific tasks for particular actors (the subject of the chapter on process diagrams), so that we can deploy constructive Type 2 reflection. However, the resulting critical review of a process is not enough. We additionally need to understand and control the process in terms of its main currency, information: what connects stakeholders, actors and tasks, what is consumed and produced in each task.
By managing information in addition to social interactions, we ensure that each task receives the right input and returns the right output, that tasks are unambiguously linked (as the output of one becomes input to another) and that all tasks are consistently and coherently specified.
Each participant can consequently know what is required of them, and what they should have to do their job. This makes the management of a process transparent and controllable, devoid of black boxes and grey areas. In this sense, the information side validates the social side, revealing possible gaps and inconsistencies, and removing unnecessary vagueness from the process.
Decision making in AECO is ostensibly based on expertise and often takes place in settings that justify the emphasis on expertise: confusing and dynamic situations, unclear goals and poorly defined procedures, a looming larger context and time pressure. These are typical of conditions in the field, where true experts, such as firefighters, pilots and nurses, must take rapid, difficult decisions under pressure and uncertainty. One could argue that similar conditions exist in many AECO situations, from design reviews to construction sites. However, the similarity is generally superficial or even artificial. There are very few situations in AECO that qualify as true emergencies. In most cases, it is the emphasis on the social side of management and the power games it involves that define the conditions, underplaying the information side and its significance for decision making. In essence, emergency conditions are created in AECO through poor preparation, inadequate procedures and lack of analyses or development in depth. Such inadequacies create the illusion that decisions must be taken on principle or on the basis of expertise and in total disregard to the huge amounts of information AECO professionals typically produce in documenting a situation and developing a design or plan. Relegating this information to a mere background for the personalities involved in a project makes little sense for the functioning of decision makers, as well as with respect to the information-intensive character of AECO.
Even when expertise is called for, it is not a matter of gut feeling alone. Analyses of decision making by experts suggest that it is a two-stage process: it does start with intuition (recognition of how one needs to respond to a situation) but this is followed by deliberate evaluation (simulation of response and its outcomes). In this blend of intuition and analysis, the simulation can be mental but is nevertheless based on information, including both general rules and specific characteristics of the particular situation. A firefighter, for example, needs to know the materials and structure of a building on fire in order to predict how the envelope and the load-bearing structure may behave or how smoke may develop in egress routes. The more relevant information is available, the better for the decision making. Furthermore, experts often rely on explicit information tools for aiding their memory and structuring their procedures, such as data charts and checklists.
The conclusion we can draw from this is that even if we treat every participant in an AECO project as an expert, capable of amazing Type 1 feats, there is every reason to invest in IM for a number of critical reasons:
• Clear information structures and flows allow managers to understand what takes place and guide the process.
• Reliable and meaningful information around each task helps other participants evaluate and adjust their own actions, generally without the need for interventions by manager.
• Any such intervention can be made less confrontational, as well as more operational, if conveyed through information.
RECOMMENDED FURTHER READING
Four books that explain dual-process theory in order of accessibility to a wider audience:
• Kahneman, D. (2013). Thinking, fast and slow. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
• Chabris, C. F., & Simons, D. J. (2010). The invisible gorilla: and other ways our intuitions deceive us. New York: Crown.
• Stanovich, K. E. (2011). Rationality and the reflective mind. New York: Oxford University Press.
• Evans, J. S. B. T., & Frankish, K. (2009). In two minds: dual processes and beyond. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Nudge theory and choice architecture are presented in: Thaler, R. H., & Sunstein, C. R. (2021). Nudge: the final edition. New Haven: Yale University Press.
A enlightening analysis of true expertise is: Klein, G. A. (1998). Sources of power: how people make decisions.
Cambridge MA: MIT Press.
The benefits of checklists for medical and other experts are presented in: Gawande, A. (2010). The checklist manifesto: how to get things right. New York: Metropolitan Books.
Key Takeaways
• Thinking comes in two different types, Type 1(fast but biased) and Type 2 (analytical but slow and expensive)
• Type 2 processes can be reflective (evaluation of Type 1 results) or algorithmic (strategies, rule systems etc., often based on cognitive decoupling)
• Failures due to Type 1 thinking include: inattentional and change blindness; planning and sun-costs fallacies; inside views; illusions of knowledge, confidence, skill and cause; inappropriate substitution; narrow framing; false coherence, invented causes and partiality in narratives
• The activation and execution of Type 2 processes depends on information
• AECO exhibits many failures that suggest a dominance of Type 1 thinking
• Management has a social and an information side
• True expertise relies on information
Exercises
1. Analyse a project known from literature to have suffered from planning or sunk-cost fallacies:
1. What were the causes of the failure in terms of the dual-process theory?
2. What would be the right frame and outside view for the project?
3. Which information is critical in this frame and view?
2. Study the MacLeamy curve (any variation):
1. Is it a law, a generalization (like Moore’s “law”) or an overgeneralization?
2. Which information is necessary for constructing the curve?
3. Give three examples that do not fit the curve, including specific information and the resulting curve.
Notes
1. The budget overrun example concerns the Amare cultural complex in The Hague, as calculated by the local Court of Auditors: https://www.rekenkamerdenhaag.nl/publicatie-onderwijs-en-cultuurcomplex/.
2. For a number of amusing spurious correlations, see http://tylervigen.com.
Process diagrams
This chapter explains how a process can be described as a graph of tasks that affords overview and supports reliable planning and effective guidance for each task and the whole process. By doing so, process diagrams address many questions on the social side of management. The chapter presupposes knowledge of graphs and in particular of directed graphs (see Appendix I).