Constructing the Olympic Dream: A Future Perfect Strategy of Project Management

Abstract

In this paper we investigate a uniquely complex organizational context-that of the fast-tracked large-scale project management of a significant piece of Sydney 2000 Olympic infrastructure, which we researched in terms of its management through the "future perfect." In a grounded analysis we resolved to track how the future perfect developed in the life of one large, complex project whose uniqueness meant that it was unable to be strategically planned in advance. We tracked the use of what we term "future perfect strategy" through analysis of data collected both in leadership meetings of the directing agency, "PALT"-Project Alliance Leadership Team-as well as in individual interviews that we conducted in and around the project, and through analysis of media coverage. Overall, the project was a success, but some problems arose along the way to completion. Largely, these were focused on issues of social rather than technical construction-something even the most strategic of plans cannot account for. As well as identifying some of the specific mechanisms for encouraging future perfect strategy that were used in the project, including encouraging "strange conversations," "playing end games," "workshopping," and "projecting feelings, concerns and issues," we also suggest some ways that the social construction issues might be handled in the future. (Interorganizational Collaboration; Project Management; Strategic Management; Future Perfect) The Future Perfect How do we deal with it now to avoid it later?This question was put by one of the Project Alliance Leadership Team members during the project that frames our reflections in this paper. In many respects, it is a quintessential management question-how to make the uncertainty attached to the future something that can be dealt with in advance of it occurring? There are many, equally quintessential, strategic management answersbut none of them frame this paper. Instead, we introduce the reader to a new conception, that of managing through the future perfect, an approach to strategic management that occurred in a context where planning was practically impossible. Out of this adversity-in which to plan was a luxury that could not be affordedemerged a new approach to strategic management.The concept of the future perfect is one that, for us, is rooted in the philosophy of Alfred Schütz (1967, p. 61), who defined the future perfect as the cognitive process by which an " actor projects his actions as if it were already over and done with and lying in the past Strangely enough, therefore, because it is pictured as completed, the planned act bears the temporal character of pastnessThe fact that it is thus pictured as if it were simultaneously past and future can be taken care of by saying that it is thought of in the future perfect tense." While many researchers and authors have adopted Schutz's notion of the future perfect (see

Temporal Work in Strategy Making

“…An emphasis on temporal work is especially relevant when actors would benefit from challenging received wisdom, reconsidering current concerns and engaging in an exploration of barely conceivable alternatives. This perspective reinforces the value of "framing experiments" (Schön and Rein 1994) and "strange conversations" (Pitsis et al 2003;Weick 1979) that allow practitioners to create breakdowns in their ingrained assumptions in order to reformulate problems at hand. Such interventions involve the construction of new strategic accounts that can prevent organizations from getting stuck in a strategy that is constrained by routinized understandings of the past, myopic views of the present, and limited visions of the future.…”

“…This gap has been noted recently by scholars who have suggested that an interpretive view of time might be useful in understanding organizational strategy making (Gioia et al 2002;Suddaby et al 2010;Tsoukas and Shepherd 2004). For example, the idea of future perfect thinking remains underdeveloped (Gioia et al 2002), meriting only a few pages in Weick's (1979Weick's ( , 1995 seminal works, and rarely taken up empirically (see Pitsis et al 2003, for an exception).…”

“…This gap has been noted recently by scholars who have suggested that an interpretive view of time might be useful in understanding organizational strategy making (Gioia et al 2002;Suddaby et al 2010;Tsoukas and Shepherd 2004). For example, the idea of future perfect thinking remains underdeveloped (Gioia et al 2002), meriting only a few pages in Weick's (1979Weick's ( , 1995 seminal works, and rarely taken up empirically (see Pitsis et al 2003, for an exception).We thus sought theoretical handholds that might help us understand the dynamic interplay among interpretations of the past, present and future. One such handhold was Emirbayer and Mische's (1998: 963) theory of human agency, which suggests that human action is a "temporally embedded process of social engagement, informed by the past (in its habitual aspect), but also oriented toward the future (as a capacity to imagine alternative possibilities) and toward the present (as a capacity to contextualize past habits and future projects within the contingencies of the moment)."…”

Knowledge formation and learning in the management of projects: A problem solving perspective

“…Beyond complex projects, whose end-states can be specified at the outset but not their designs (Pitsis et al, 2003), are found organic projects whose endstates are often aspirational at the outset and can evolve unpredictably over time. For these organic projects, both their end-states and designs need to adapt to ongoing experience, learning, and resource availability, e.g., government programmes (Lindblom, 1979;Lundin and Söderholm, 2013).…”

Sharing Design Rights: A Commons Approach for Developing Infrastructure

“…As a result, infrastructure projects frequently run late, overrun budgets, and deliver outputs that leave many user groups and communities discontent (Morris 1994, Miller and Lessard 2001, Pitsis et al 2003, Esty, 2004, Gil and Tether 2011.…”