On a twitter discussions and email exchanges there is a notion of populist books versus technical books used to address issues and problems encountered in our project management domains. My recent book Performance-Based Project Management® is a populist book. There are principles, practices, and processes in the book that can be put to use on real projects, but very few equations and numbers. It's mostly narrative about increasing the probability of project success. But the to calculate that probability based on other numbers, processes, and systems is not there. That's the realm of Technical books and journal papers.
The content of the book was developed with the help of editors at American Management Association, the publisher. The Acquisition Editor contacted me about writing a book for the customers of AMA. He explained up front AMA is in the money making business of selling books. And that although I may have many good ideas, even ideas that people might want to read about, it's an AMA book and I'll be getting lots of help developing those ideas into a book that will make money for AMA.
The distinction between a populist book and a technical book are the differences between a book that addresses a broad audience with a general approach to the topic and a deep dive book focused on a narrow audience.
But one other disticntion is for most of the technical approaches, some form of calculation takes place to support the materials found in the populist material. One simple example is estimating. There are estimating articles and some books that lay out the principles of estimates. We have those in our domain in the form of guidelines and a few texts. But to calculate the Estimate To Complete in a statistically sound manner, technical knowledge and the underlying mathematics of non-linear, non-stationary, stochastic processes (Monte Carlo Simulation of the projects work structure) is needed.
Two examples of populist versus technical
Two from my past two from my current work.
These two books are about the same topic. General relativity and its description of the shape of our universe. One is a best selling popularization of the topic, found in many home libraries of those interested in this fascinating topic. The one on the left is on my shelf from a graduate school course on General Relativity along with Misner, Thorne, and Wheeler's Gravity.
Dense is an understatement for the math and the results of the book on the left. So if you want to calculate something about a rapidly spinning Black Hole, you're going to need that book. The book on the right will talk about those Black Holes in non-mathematical terms, but no numbers come out from that description.
The book on the left is about probabilistic processes in everyday life that we misunderstand or are biased to misunderstand. The many cognitive biases we use to convince ourselves we are making the right decisions on projects are illustrated through nice charts and graphs.
We use the book on the left in our work with non-stationary stochastic process of complex project cost and schedule modeling. Making these decisions is critical to quantifying how technical and economics risk may affect a system's cost. This book is a treatment of how probability methods are applied to model, measure, and manage risk, schedule, and cost engineering for advanced systems. Garvey's shows how to construct models, do the calculations, and make decisions with these calculations.
Here's The Point - Finally
If you come across a suggestion that decisions can be made in the absence of knowing anything about the future numbers or about actually doing the math, put that suggestion in the class of populist descriptions of a complex topic.
If you can't calculate something, then you can't make a decision based on the evidence represented by numbers. If you can't decide based on the math, then the only way left is to decide on intuition, hunchs, opinion, or some other seriously flawed non-analytical basis.
Just a reminder from Mr. Deming stated in yesterday's post
If it's not your money, there's likley an expectation that those providing the money are intestered in the calculations needed to make those decisions.