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ou can assemble a squad of clever, confident technicians who can chant the plan like a catechism, and still watch them contrive a fiasco. Why? Because if the whole crew hasn’t been schooled in the same structured approach, you’ll suffer that most demoralizing of blunders: friendly fire.

Little lapses (those homely, ignoble errors that safety engineers collect like lepidopterists) align like James Reason’s slices of Swiss cheese and let calamity whistle straight through.

Why Structure Isn’t Optional

Method is not a nicety; it’s a prophylactic. Standards don’t merely tidy the paperwork: they make roles, checkpoints, and decision rights so unambiguous that the team advances as a formation, not as a jam session. The fantasy of “heroic improvisation” belongs to airport novels. Winning work is done by people reading from a shared playbook and safe enough to say, “Hold on, that’s wrong.” (Google’s Project Aristotle, which is to corporate myth what cold water is to the face, found precisely that.)

If you doubt that alignment can be radical, consult Atul Gawande’s case for checklists. Those modest, almost embarrassing rituals (same steps, same order, every time) cut complications and deaths because the team aligns. It’s choreography, not virtuoso solos.

What This Training Is (and Is Not)

This is not an invitation to gild each specialist’s lily. It’s a demand for shared proficiency in your chosen method so that everyone:

• • plays from the same book (artifacts, ceremonies, controls),

  • knows the checkpoints, the roles, and who holds the casting vote,

  • and interrupts the familiar chain of trifling errors before it bulks into failure.

The Tax You Pay When You Don’t

Neglect the training and you purchase, at extortionate rates: signal loss with stakeholders; ownership so muddled that decisions ooze rather than occur; ad-hoc patchwork that saws through quality and schedule; and shadow systems that disperse “truth” across warring spreadsheets. Read enough incident reports and you’ll tire of the refrain: thin training plus vague procedure equals harm you could have headed off. 

What “Good” Looks Like

Do it before kickoff, not mid-flight. Teaching your methodology under fire is how manuals become exhibits at the inquiry. Do it for the whole team, not just the project manager. Making the PM the lone keeper of the tablets is both unfair and ineffectual. NASA runs a knowledge program to spread lessons laterally, not to enthrone a single high priest.

Run role-specific drills: who decides, when, on which inputs, and when to escalate. Install checklists and light-touch controls; they beat heroism by a mile (ask Gawande). Practice dissent. 

And for complex initiatives with many handoffs, General Stanley McChrystal’s book Team of Teams usefully translates to this: common method first; speed as a consequence, not a substitute.

On Institutional Responsibility

To demand that a PM lead a team untrained in the house methodology, inside a company that hasn’t mastered it either, is a category error. The likely outcome is not “learning by doing”; it is defeat by déjà vu, followed by a hygienic post-mortem listing the training that would have spared you the public condemnation. NASA’s lessons-learned system exists for the boring but noble purpose of preventing the preventable.

Coda

No generals were consulted for this sermon, but the maxim is older than most uniforms: rules of engagement first, then the mission. Harmony is not frippery; it is force multiplication. Skilled people, drilled in the same structured approach, are your best chance at deliverance, especially when parachuting into the swamp of office politics and the quiet sabotage of the well-mannered.

                                                                                                                                                                                                              – Photo based on the game Call of Duty