Cognitive Readiness in Project Teams: Reducing Project Complexity and Increasing Success in Project Management

Issues surrounding business complexity plague organizations throughout the world. This situation is particularly true of the numerous complex projects and programs upon which organizations embark on a regular basis. Current project management processes and standards are based on Newtonian/Cartesian principles, such as linearity, reductionism, and single source problem causation. However, complex projects exhibit both Newtonian/Cartesian characteristics and complex systems characteristics, such as emergence, self-organization, non-linearity, non-reductionism, and multi-source problem causation. To conduct successful projects, complementary ways of approaching projects are required, and new competencies for those who manage projects and for those on project teams are required as well.

There are a number of books available to help project managers and teams address the issue of systems behavior. However, there are none that approach complex projects from a neuroscience-based approach to human behavior and ambiguity. This book does exactly that in order to reduce project complexity and thereby increase the probability of project success.

Cognitive Readiness in Project Teams looks to the concept of cognitive readiness (CR), first developed by the United States Department of Defense to better prepare and manage teams of individuals in complex battlefield situations. Its intent is to make project managers and teams more focused, responsive, resilient and adaptive through self-mastery and the mastering of interpersonal relationships. It introduces a CR framework for project managers and teams. This framework has neuroscience fundamentals and theorems as the foundation for the three pillars of CR: mindfulness, emotional intelligence, and social intelligence. The book is a compendium of chapters written by renowned authors in the fields of project management, neuroscience, mindfulness, and emotional and social intelligence.

Carl Belack, Daniele Di Filippo, Ivano Di Filippo