"WE'VE BEEN TALKING ABOUT BRIDGING BUSINESS & IT FOR 40 YEARS.
WE'RE NO BETTER AT IT NOW THAN WE WERE THEN."

What We're Doing Isn't Working - And Everybody Knows It.

Broken Promises

Boards, CEOs & CFOs aren’t seeing the returns on IT they’ve been promised.

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Missed Opportunities

CIOs & CTOs aren’t delivering
the value they know their
teams could deliver.

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False Comforts

PMOs keep trying new governance models but still can’t find a solution.

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Endless Headaches

IT projects continue to fail at appalling rates.

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We’re focused on the wrong thing. The problem isn’t tech. It’s not project governance. It’s how our brain works.

WE’RE MISSING THE REAL PROBLEM.

And that’s causing an appalling number of IT project failures.

All Projects

Less Than $1 Million
7 out of 10 fail

Success
Significant Level of Failure: 30% - 300% Over Budget; Behind Schedule; or Under-Deliver
Group 160-svg
Total Failure/Complete Write-Off

Large Projects *

Larger Than $1 Million
19 out of 20 fail

* McKinsey & Oxford found that 1 out of 6 large projects go so badly they threaten to bankrupt the business.

Those Failures Cost The US $1.82 Trillion a Year *

$260 Billion

Write-offs of total failures

$1.56 Trillion

Ongoing remediation of partial
failures that eventually go live

$1.82 Trillion

Total annual cost to
US companies

40 - 50%

Of IT staff time spent on rework
that could have been avoided

36 - 50x

Cost to remediate errors prior
to go-live

100x

Cost to remediate errors
post go-live

* From The Cost of Poor Software Quality in the US: A 2020 Report by the Consortium for Information & Software Quality.

75% OF THESE FAILURES ARE ATTRIBUTED TO “COMMUNICATION” ISSUES

It’s really a function of silence—it’s all the things we don’t say.

All the details the business forgets to share

All the questions the tech team forgets to ask

All the assumptions they both forget to confirm

WHY HAVEN’T WE FIXED THESE COMMUNICATION ISSUES?

Because we couldn't figure out what was causing them. Now we know.

Neuroscientists have discovered that our brain cuts corners. Humans evolved to ignore details. We treat them like they’re irrelevant. 
We only care about the point, or moral, of a story. That cripples our ability to communicate the details that are critical to every IT project.

WE’RE OFTEN ON AUTOPILOT

We have an autopilot that handles 95% of all we do, We don’t control it. It controls us.

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WE USE MODELS FOR EVERYTHING

Our autopilot uses a pattern recognition engine to construct models to store knowledge.

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WE’RE BIG PICTURE PEOPLE

Models get summarized to capture the ‘gist’ of the story-–not the details.

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WE’VE GOT LIMITED RAM

Stories are short because we can only remember 5 to 9 story elements.

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WHO NEEDS ACCURACY?

What’s critical is that we remember the point of the story--its accuracy is irrelevant.

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WHAT WE SEE IS ALL THERE IS

If a piece of data isn’t in one of our models, we treat it like it doesn’t exist.

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WE’RE PLAGUED BY BROWN OUTS

Our brain operates on limited power. It prioritizes critical ‘jobs’ and kills the rest.

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EXPERTISE COMES AT A PRICE

The more expert we become, the more detail we internalize, and the more we forget.

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Now that we know what’s going on, we can put safeguards in place to ensure that critical details don’t get overlooked.

WE NEED A MODEL FOR EVERYTHING

Neuroscientists have also discovered that our brain stores all information in models—like holograms in our head. These models aren’t optional. They’re mandatory. We can’t think without them.

In fact, “thinking” only happens when we move around in a model.
If we aren’t given a model to work with, we must invent our own.
And the models we invent are as unique as our fingerprints.

IT project teams must have a common model, if they’re to have
any hope of keeping everyone on the same page.

WE Remember our MODELs as stories

Models contain everything we know about a topic—like tigers. We can’t remember everything, so we boil it down to a story summary.

Stories are short—usually not more than seven elements. Stories are inaccurate, incomplete, and prone to error during recall. Stories usually misrepresent reality.

That sounds bad, but from an evolutionary perspective, it’s irrelevant. All that matters for our survival is that we remember the point of the story, “Tigers are dangerous.”

WE PAY A PRICE FOR EXPERTISE

An expert’s mental model gets bigger and better, but their story (their summary of that model) stays the same. That’s a problem, but something else happens that impedes communication even more. Our brain reconfigures itself and creates new circuits that are dedicated to automatically processing the information associated with our expertise. Experts can unconsciously respond 3,000 times faster than a layman. That’s great, but it comes at a price—our memories about that topic get deleted. The greater our expertise, the more details we internalize, and the more we forget. We can act fast, but we can’t explain why we did, what we did.

The first people a project team turns tothe Subject Matter Expertsto learn everything they need to know about a process, are the very people least physically capable of sharing what they know! There’s only one way to help an expert remember—get them ‘moving’ around in their model. Movement = Awareness.

If We're ever going to bridge business & it...

…If we’re going to open lines of communication between two groups who struggle to understand each other and share business requirements, we need to give the business and IT teams three things:

  • A common mental model about their business processes that they all know and understand.
  • A roadmap to guide them through that model and checklists at each step to make them think about all the things they’d otherwise overlook.
  • Answer templates for those checklists so they can see what they need to capture to fully communicate what the project needs to do.

 

We have that solutionand we’ll give it to you for freeif you commit to learn how to use it.

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