Practices for Project Leadership - Third Practice

By Alexander Laufer

Challenge the Status Quo

In a famous essay, Oxford philosopher Isaiah Berlin described two approaches to life using a simple parable about the fox and the hedgehog. The fox is cunning and creative creature, able to devise a myriad of complex strategies for sneak attacks upon the hedgehog. The hedgehog is a painfully slow creature with a very simple daily agenda: searching for food and maintaining his home. Every day the fox waits for the hedgehog while planning to attack him. When the hedgehog senses the danger, he reacts in the same simple, but powerful, way every day: He rolls up into a perfect little ball with a sphere of sharp spikes pointing outward in all directions. Then the fox retreats while starting to plan his new line of attack for the next day. Each day this confrontation takes place, and despite the greater cunning of the fox, the hedgehog always wins.

Based on this parable, Berlin attempted to divide the world into two basic groups: foxes and hedgehogs. Foxes pursue many ends at the same time, yet they do not integrate their thinking into one  overall concept. Hedgehogs, on the other hand, simplify a complex world into a single overall concept that unifies and guides everything they do.

In recent years, several prominent management scholars have discussed this parable while attempting to answer the following question: Do successful senior managers behave more like hedgehogs or like foxes? The debate regarding senior managers is still ongoing, but when it comes to successful project managers, I have found that they behave both like hedgehogs and foxes, though they place the hedgehogs in the driver's seat.

Like the hedgehog, the project managers are guided by one overriding purpose: delivering successful results to the customer. They clearly felt a sense of ownership of the project, involving an intellectual and emotional bond with the mission that they were trying to accomplish. For these project managers, the project objectives were not simply the technical definitions of the customer's needs. Rather, for them, project objectives meant first of all project results, and they felt total personal accountability for those results. It also meant that they had the self-discipline required for placing all other objectives and opportunities secondary. It was almost as if they were programmed to follow an inner compass that was always pointing toward true north. However, if they could not reach this goal by following conventional methods, they responded by challenging the status quo. This kind of response requires strong willpower and courage.

This text is part of the book "Mastering the Leadership Role in Project Management - Practices that Deliver Remarkable Results". Author: Alexander Laufer. Editor: FT Press.

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