Mike Lyons traces project management from craftsmen to Taylor's time-and-motion studies to today's digital chaos. Handmade Italian shoes worked fine until factories needed to scale. Now those 1800s factory methods break down in a VUCA world where everything changes too fast.
Okay. So now, before we can get into how to apply agile ways of working to project management, we need to cover a little bit of history, sort of like how we got here. Boring. And to do that, I'm gonna tell you a little bit about my shoes. Now, I have a lot of shoes, probably too many, if I'm being honest, but one pair is my favorite. These handcrafted Italian leather shoes. Italian leather made in a small shop in Italy. Now, this small shoe shop in Italy is owned by a skilled craftsman. And. And back in the 1800s, well, that's how all products were created. Small shops filled with craftspeople who were experts at what they did. And they did everything. They handled customer service, they handled marketing, they handled maintenance and repair. They managed the supply chain, and of course, they made the products. But that way of working well, it doesn't scale very well. If you had something like a war, for example, you needed tens of thousands of pairs of shoes. The Craftsman model of building shoes, well, that doesn't scale. So right around the late 1800s, this guy, Frederick Winslow Taylor, comes on the scene. He was likely the very first management consultant. He worked with folks like Henry Ford or Henry Gantt. You might recognize the name from the Gantt charts you've used before. But Taylor, he's really focused on how to optimize the way we make physical things. How do we increase productivity, how do we increase quality in a sort of factory setting. And Taylor went around to different factories, and he would bring a stopwatch with him, and he would do time trials, try to find standards for anything he'd be doing in the factory. He'd be looking at other measures as well, like. Like, if your job was to scoop coal, Taylor would figure out the optimal amount of coal to have on your shovel is 21 and a half pounds, for example. So with Taylor, it was all about maximizing productivity and efficiency through standardization. And that's a good thing. But there was some not so good stuff that came with it too. Taylor generally had a negative sentiment when it came to the people who were doing the actual work. And you begin to see this sort of in the separation of management from. From workers. The managers, they were the smart people. They would figure out the right way to do the work. And. And workers, well, they just needed to follow orders. Well, in agile circles, there's a lot of sort of, like, demonizing and negative talk about Taylor, but. But the strides in productivity and quality that we saw in the Industrial Revolution, well, those can be traced directly back to his work. Okay, now consider this, here's an image. This is from Carlotta Perez. And here Perez identifies five technological revolutions that have occurred over the past two and a half centuries and each leading to significant socioeconomic transformations. But as you can see, right around the time that Taylor was working at the age of electricity and engineering, and a lot of the project management best practices that you're probably still familiar with began to emerge and sort of come from that time period. Things like Gantt charts as an example, work breakdown structures, standardizing our work, top down hierarchies. A lot of these project management practices, well they, they came from this age, the age of Taylorism. Now there's nothing inherently wrong with working in that way. In fact, if your work is predictable, there's nothing wrong with planning the work and, and then, and then working through that plan. You have a plan, perfect, I need a plan. What's your plan? You know, that's fundamentally what Taylor's approach to managing work is all about. It's rooted in the idea that the future is knowable, that the future is predictable, that we can plan everything at the start. And if we have rigid adherence to our plans, we're going to get what we expect to get. The trouble is that that way of thinking, that way of management, it was designed for the late 1800s for factory work. If you're building a Model T, for example, there's a fairly low level of uncertainty. It's complicated. Sure, you gotta assemble all the pieces in just the right order, but if you do it in just the right order, out on the other side is gonna come a Model T. But is that the age we live in today? No, I mean we live in the age of digital, the age of AI, of cloud computing, large language models. The world around us today is rapidly changing and it's changing at an increasingly faster pace. Things are inher, apparently unpredictable. It's often said we live in a VUCA world as volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity. And there are lots of indicators of this. Here's one. This is a rolling average. The average lifespan of a company on Standard and Poor's 500 index, the S&P 500. If you look at this chart, you can see very clearly the average lifespan of a company on the S&P 500. Well, it's been falling actually dramatically since about 1965. It's often said this is because the world is becoming more volatile, uncertain and complex. So we can recognize that we're living in a faster, more volatile world and things are changing at a more rapid pace in the age of digital applying project management practices that were designed and suited for factory work in the late 1800s. It's probably not our best choice, and I'm pretty sure it's not used at the place I want to buy my next favorite pair of shoes.
