“Normal Deviance”? How Our Organizations Lost the Plot in Managing Projects
Initiating and successfully managing projects in modern organizations continues to be a challenging and often frustrating undertaking, with unclear deadlines, temporary teams of “strangers” across multiple disciplines, competing and often contradictory expectations from a variety of stakeholder groups, and sometimes uncertain technologies in operation.
In these challenging settings, organization cultures also play a role in frustrating our best intentions by tacitly promoting and reinforcing a variety of destructive behaviors amongst project team members. These “deviant” activities typically occur as a response to poor oversight, unrealistic expectations, and the desire to “get things done” on the project. Over time, such behaviors become normalized and are simply assumed to be standard operating procedures, despite our awareness that many of these activities are fundamentally dangerous or flawed.
This webinar will examine the concept of normalization of deviance (NoD) in projects, presenting our research on the methods for identifying the underlying causes of deviant behaviors, how we see NoD typically manifest itself, and some remedial actions that organizations can take to first recognize and subsequently correct the behaviors and the culture that promotes them.
Jeffrey K. Pinto, Ph.D.
Program Chair
Dr. Jeffrey Pinto is professor and Andrew Morrow and Elizabeth Lee Black Chair in the Management of Technology at Penn State. He has been the program chair for Penn State's Master of Project Management program since its inception in 2002.