Working with the Hof

The Hof gets everywhere. You can’t switch on the TV, listen to radio, open a newspaper or check your feed without coming face to face with the Hof. Larger than life, irrepressible, loud, brash and ageless. The Hof is simply everywhere.

The Hof, better known to managers everywhere as Hofstadter’s Law tells us that ‘Things are going to take longer than we expect, even when we take into account Hofstadter’s law.’ Introduced by cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter in 1979, the law reminds us that the time lines applied to projects will be substantially short of the actual time that said task will eventually require – even when we try to compensate for this by applying, yes, you guessed it: Hofstadter’s Law! The more complex the task, the more aggressively the law applies.

Root Cause Analysis, my area of focus, reveals time and time again that The Hof is a significant contributor to many of the problems that hold organisations back. In fact, if The Hof is considered as a form of contagion that spreads throughout all critical resources, not just time, we can pretty much apply Hofstadter’s law to explain most aspects of project failure. Let’s just list a few of these failures at random; staff fatigue, troublesome weather conditions, expired permissions, poor documentation, poor maintenance, training failures, labour shortage, unexpected overtime, currency exchange costs, material shortages, even government and policy changes, and spiralling costs of finance. In a world of shrinking margins any one of these predators can be the difference between profit and loss. In the real world, they rarely hunt alone.

And of course, we all know of projects that blew a hole through their budget like a 12-bore shotgun or took years or even decades longer to complete that expected. The Scottish Parliament building, in Edinburgh, was 3 years late and cost taxpayers £414 million (just 10 times the original budget), Wembley Stadium in London was 5 years late and the Sydney Opera House a mere decade late and 1357% over budget. The queen of all though, must be the $3 billion Montreal Olympic stadium which came in on time (although features like the town and roof were incomplete) but to do so, over ran its budget by a mere 2000%. The channel tunnel, World Trade Centre station, Berlin Airport, Denver Airport, Three Gorges Damn in China, all late, all billions over budget.

So, this begs a question; why then, do the best brains in the world so often plan and budget unrealistically without making room for The Hof? The answer is, to a point, is simple. Hofstadter’s law is a manifestation of Planning Fallacy, a “fundamentalist cult” within what psychologists call Optimism Bias; the firm belief that we are less likely to experience negative events than positive ones.

Hofstadter’s law is particularly odd kind of variant of Optimism Bias though, since it’s a delusion that most of us are very aware of (maybe it’s that which makes it the most genuine of delusions), yet we repeatedly fail to take it in to account. Just think, how many times in your life have you sat down to do a ten-minute piece of admin that took an hour? – or worse still, asked a colleague to do a ‘quick job’ with those dreaded three words “Can you just…” And if we also introduce the ‘Peter Principle’, namely that many of us are promoted to our precise level of incompetence, it’s clearer still that we are woefully unable to comprehend the scope and realistic likely influences on any major project. To make matters worse, neither are our team, financiers, stakeholders or clients. We’re all operating in a groupthink mindset that’s contributing to this Hofstadter delusion.

So, can we do anything? Or in light of all this are we totally powerless? I’d like to think not, I’d like to think that there is an answer and it sits within tools and skills that many problem solvers already use; Root Cause Analysis.

RCA is traditionally used as reactive form of complex problem solving, using cause and effect analysis to uncover all the causes of events and incidents, from the obvious hiding in plain sight, through to the hidden but no less pernicious. But it doesn’t have to be anchored in the reactive. The Sologic RCA method is just as effective as form of proactive analysis; equally at home as a planning tool or means to conduct an effective pre-mortem (imagining and investigating the failure of a project yet to launch). In both instances the method revels the known and, crucially, the unknown causes that contribute to the time and financial demands of any project. If this can be combined with effective reporting, data management and common cause analysis (made easy through Sologic’s Causelink software) improvements in institutional learning have the potential to be exponential.

We’ll likely never fully shake off The Hof. I suspect he’s with us forever. But RCA methods and effective RCA Software are two ways in which we can methodically bridge the gap between the resources we expect to need and the resources we’ll eventually end up using.

Oh, and in case you were wondering, this blog did take three times longer than I anticipated.