I was with a colleague recently; discussing the question of can portfolio management improve the chances of organisational success? The insight that my colleague gave me was based upon the quotation that I had never heard before by Brian Quinn (“Strategic Planning R.I.P.”).
“A good deal of corporate planning …… is like a ritual rain dance. It has no effect on the weather that follows, but those who engage in it think it does. … Moreover, much of the advice related to corporate planning is directed at improving the dancing, not the weather.”
With this quotation in mind I have been exploring the OGC guide Management of Portfolio™, addressing the issue of; is it another ritual rain dance that an organisation performs to try to invoke rain to protect its assets (harvest), or could it really help to change the weather?
Knowing little about rain dances I discovered that it was an early sort of meteorology that Native Americans in the mid-west of United States often tracked and followed known weather patterns while offering to perform a rain dance for settlers in return for trade items.
From my practice, portfolio management seems to be a ritual. A set of actions, performed mainly for their corporate symbolic value, prescribed by organisational traditions. The actions chosen by the performers seem rational to the initiated or sometimes illogical as seen as such by the uninitiated onlooker. With the outcome being to secure the funding for the right change initiative!
I have run a variety of change portfolios, some comprising of IT enablers and business change initiatives. As a member of a senior management team, we established a ritual that we performed on specific occasions to define and review the delivery of our change initiatives. We performed the rain dance as individuals and as a group in the board room, in private, but on occasions in public when we declared our strategic intents to the corporate body.
The purposes of our ritual rain dance was varied; satisfying organisational obligations or ideals, building and strengthening bonds with the senior management team, demonstrating respect or submission to others within the organisation by stating one’s affiliation, obtaining organizational acceptance or approval of our changes, attempting to predict and change the success of changes (weather), and occasionally for the pleasure of the ritual itself.
Stay tuned for part 2!