Preface

If I had more sense, I would have realized much earlier that writing this book would be a right-brain project. But before coming to this realization, I had to hit a brick wall.

I planned and wrote the first draft of the book in a very left-brain fashion. It was logical and rational, and the content covered all the major stereotypes we have come to associate with the right brain. And when I read through the draft, I could readily tell that it was awful.

Let me cut to Chapter 18 with a sneak preview. There Colin Funk offers a perspective on the “project challenge,” a place where we experience a formidable obstacle to progress on the project. So many of us have hit such a brick wall on our projects. The interesting thing about the project challenge is that it is as much an internal challenge as an external one. It is a personal challenge to change—perhaps attitude or perspective. The internal shift and the external one go hand in hand: meeting the internal challenge enables us to overcome the external one.

My brick wall, my project challenge, was to make something worthwhile out of the awful draft of the book—to somewhere find lemonade among the lemons. It was obvious that cosmetic changes would not do. The project needed an overhaul.

My internal challenge was for me to see this project from a new perspective.

Many authors will tell you that writing a book is a journey, and I am here to tell you that writing this book was all that and more. The true journey started when I came face to face with the brick wall. The trip over the wall to the other side started with a change in mindset and a change in management approach. And that is what right-brain project management is all about.

Once I began to approach this book as a right-brain project, I turned away from my preconceived notions and took steps to make sense of how the right brain operates in project management. I pulled on the exposed threads of this topic, and in following them, found some fascinating and completely unexpected ingredients of what it means to do right-brain work on a project.

At first glance, these threads seemingly have nothing to do with projects; upon further examination, though, it becomes clear that they have everything to do with projects! And so in this book we will travel through philosophy, emotion, intuition, the Project Management Institute’s A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK® Guide), complexity, personal development, morality, spiritual survival, trust, and what it means to be a hero. Oh, and we will rub elbows with a few folks like Paul McCartney, Jack Nicholson, and Marge Gunderson from Fargo. We will go to a couple of sporting events and a few movies along the way. Did you know that movies like Napoleon Dynamite and Pretty Woman offer useful insights to the project manager?

It is important to me that whatever this book offers be grounded in real-world knowledge and experience—straight from the project street. I will provide extensive references to research and the experiences of project managers who use these right-brain approaches successfully on a regular basis in their work. Several professionals will offer their creative insights for managing projects. We will study several projects that performed phenomenally because they made heavy use of right-brain ingredients. The book also highlights some great techniques for accessing powerful right-brain capabilities with our right-brain toolkit features.

This book begins with an exploration of the current landscape for project management, highlighting contemporary projects that are complex and aggressive. Effective management of contemporary projects is as much about personal development as it is about Gantt charts. With this in mind, we will shift into topics that address how people grow and develop patterns of thinking and attitudes that have a profound effect on the management of projects. We will talk about what truly motivates people to get out of bed and right to their projects—to overcome whatever stands in the way of their objectives. We will talk about the profound changes that take place on projects and how to navigate those changes well.

Our journey then takes us through the seven principles of right-brain project management. These principles are founded on the powerful and rich processing capabilities of the right brain, and they map well into the unique and demanding needs of complex and aggressive projects.

Right-brain project management is not a recipe or prescription. Compared with conventional project management, it represents a shift in attitude and a shift in perspective. It is not a replacement for conventional project management; the two are complementary and very powerful together.

Ultimately, contemporary projects need an integration of left- and right-brain approaches. Because contemporary project management is overwhelmingly left brain, I have chosen to focus on right-brain perspectives. However, it is critical to understand that an appropriate balance of left- and right-brain techniques works best.

Finally, the book concludes with the personal, internal challenge of the contemporary project. The formidable challenges of today’s projects call us to grow in character, each in our own ways. The project is a story, and we are the characters.

Let us begin.

Mike Aucoin
College Station, Texas
maucoin@leadingedgemgmt.com
www.leadingedgemgmt.com