Mother says I was a dancer before I could walk,

She says I began to sing long before I could talk.

And I've often wondered, how did it all start?

Who found out that nothing can capture a heart

like a melody can?

− Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus,

Thank You for the Music(1)

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For reasons of survival, we need one hemisphere (in humans and many animals, the left) to pay narrow attention to detail, to grab hold of things we need, while the other, the right, keeps an eye out for everything else. The result is that one hemisphere is good at utilizing the world, the other better at understanding it.

− Iain McGilchrist,

Project Management is generally understood as a left-brain activity:

Manage, that is control, human and material resources, risks, schedules, etc, to produce a product or service on Time, as Specified, within Budget.

However, Project Management, understood through the lens of Iain McGilchrist's exploration of brain lateralization, is an art and a science; a right-brain art and a left-brain science.

Some aspects of project management, as described in PMI's Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge(3), the PMBOK Guide, are clearly left hemisphere processes. For example:

• Define and follow the Project Plan, including the WBS, Gantt Charts, etc.,
• Determine Process Dependancies and the items on the Critical Path,
• Develop and Control the Schedule,
• Estimate Costs,
• Determine and Control the Budget,
• Quantify Risks,
• All Controlling processes.

Hiring people looks like a left-brain activity: check their qualifications, verify their experience. If they check sufficient boxes including salary requirements, hire them. Similarly; firing people. If an individual does not measure up, solve the problem by firing him or her. And distill it to a science, or at least, an algorithm: on an annual basis quantify each employee's costs and value. Review their job descriptions, measure the cost of their wages, salaries, and benefits against the value they bring with their performance, knowledge, and experience. Measure their costs against their value. If they are worth more to the organization than they cost, keep them. If they are worth less than they cost, let them go. Comfort them by saying, “It's nothing personal; it's just business.” It's painless (except to the people being fired). Eliminate or outsource projects or operations and terminate the employment of the people on those teams or divisions.

Jack Welch at GE, “Neutron Jack” to his friends and admirers, “Jack the Ripper” to his critics and victims, became a hero on Wall Street by firing the underperforming 10% of GE staff every year.(4) His approach: “measure performance, fire the lowest 10%, repeat” was entirely left-brain. And he was not alone. John Mack, aka “Mack the Knife,” fired 10,000 at Morgan Stanley and thousands more when he took the helm of Credit Suisse and again when Credit Suisse bought DLJ.

Jack the Ripper and Mack the Knife created corporate cultures of fear, anger. and resentment; dog-eat-dog competitions of unfriendly rivals and internal enemies, not thriving collaborative cultures of teamwork and cooperation. Today we would say that they created toxic work environments.

This is the opposite of the zeitgeist in Silicon Valley. Their failure is generally looked upon as a learning experience. It's not that one can almost not be expected to succeed without at least one failure, but rather that failure is looked at as a learning experience, and, more importantly, when you fire people for their failures then you will have gained nothing from training and mentoring them. And when they succeed, someone else will gain, perhaps a fortune, from their success, from their learning, from your efforts.

Regardless of how you look at failure, hiring, training, and mentoring team members, and building and leading teams, especially high-performance teams, are right-brain activities. These require understanding and emotional intelligence, and cannot be quantified or reduced to spreadsheets, formulas, or algorithms. The hiring manager needs to decide whether the candidate can do the job, is willing to do the job, will be manageable on the job, and will be a contributor to the team. Can do the job is a left-brain assessment. Is willing, manageable, and likely to be a contributor are right-brain determinations. These are leaps of faith, gut feelings, decisions made with incomplete data.

Right brain elements of project management are essentially all components of project management that require leadership, communications, or strategic thinking.

Tactical processes, those requiring attention to detail, tend to be left-brain.

Strategic processes, those requiring out-of-the-box thinking are right-brain.

Diving deeper into the McGilchrist – a left-brain activity

The brains of mammals and birds are divided into two hemispheres; the “left-brain” and the “right-brain.” In humans and placental mammals these are separated by a bundle of nerves called the “Corpus Callosum.” Birds such as chickens keep one eye, the right, focused on distinguishing food from grains of sand, particles of dirt, pebbles, etc., and the left eye open scanning for danger. Hunters, whether feline, canine, or human, including foxes hunting chickens while alert to the hazards presented by farmers and their dogs, use their left-brain to look for prey and their right-brain plan their attacks while watching out for danger.

McGilchrist explains that the left-brain, which controls the right side of the body and speech, allows humans to be analytical, logical, and pragmatic. Similarly, the right-brain allows us to be more creative and imaginative, allowing us to feel, express and understand emotions in ourselves and others, and also make decisions based on gut feelings and “intuition;” making decisions despite gaps in our knowledge or the information at hand. The left-brain focuses on the immediate; the right-brain allows us to see the big picture and fill in the blanks.

We also know that infants learn to recognize and understand words long before they learn to speak. They will wave, “Bye-bye,” when an older child or adult says, “Bye-bye,” and waves to them. This suggests that the right-brain actively comprehends spoken language and body language and can respond physically before the left brain has learned how to respond verbally. So, Andersson and Ulvaeus at ABBA were right, not just for the narrator in “Thank You For The Music,” but for most children.

Note, however, that the terms “left-brain” and “right-brain,” while useful, are a simplification. They are not actually separate brains. The hemispheres work together. Consider an obvious example: spelling, typing, and writing. The mechanics of writing are clearly left-brain processes. However, the key element of writing, whether memoranda, essays, novels, poetry, or music, the key that lies beneath the surface, i.e. determining the ideas to express, the story to tell, and the words to use to express those ideas or stories is in the right hemisphere. Writing and other forms of communication are combined left-brain and right-brain capabilities.

Left-brain right-brain integration are dramatized on virtually every episode of Star Trek, the original series.(5)

Mr. Spock was presented as governing internally by logic, allowing no emotion; he was presented as 100% left-brain. Dr. McCoy, on the other hand, a medical doctor, practicing a profession governed by science, was primarily right-brained: he was emotional and a racist.(6) Mr. Scott, the ship's Chief Engineer, used intuition and hunches to keep the ship running and coax power out of the engines when needed, even when doing so defied rational expectations. His was an integrated left-brain and right-brain approach to engineering and mechanics. In real life, the best mechanics speak of a feel for the cars and other machinery they work on.

Similarly, the left-brain oriented Mr. Spock, denying the importance of emotion, focusing entirely on logic, displayed right-brain capabilities. He was personally loyal to Kirk and the Federation. He had the emotional intelligence to understand that he was alien to both Earth and Vulcan and knew he would not be effective in a command role. He played chess, played the Vulcan Lute, and bluffed that “Vulcans never bluff” in order to accomplish his goals. He knew, intellectually, and emotionally, from “All Our Yesterdays” that emotion while suppressed, remained in his DNA. He experienced emotion via empathy with every mind meld.

And of course, Captain Kirk consistently achieved success by making decisions with his right-brain despite having incomplete information. Kirk's ultimate display of left-brain right-brain integration may have been reprogramming the computer to rescue the Kobiyashi Maru or allowing Gary Seven to do what he needed to do in “Assignment: Earth.”

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The obviously left-brain elements of Project Management include:

• Developing, guiding, and following the Project Plan,
• Determining process dependencies and the items on the Critical Path,
• Developing the Schedule,
• Quantifying Risk

However, these are really right-brain processes.

Developing, guiding, and following the Project Plan requires understanding the needs of the enterprise and the stakeholders, and communicating with the stakeholders regarding the project, its budget, risks, timelines, and side effects.

Determining the Critical Path requires the Project Manager to understand the project, the resources required to complete the project, and the risks that can occur.

Developing the Schedule requires the Project Manager to understand what needs to get done, when, by whom, and how quickly and effectively the team members can and will work together.

Qualifying Risk requires Quantifying Risk. The project manager must understand the project, the local and macro environments, internal and external stakeholders, and must be able to assess what can go wrong and the ramifications of the various risks. Expert Judgment is the Project Manager's primary tool and technique.(7)

In each of these examples, the right-brain informs the left-brain, which feeds information back to the right-brain.

We think strategically with the right-brain. We focus on details, follow instructions, and execute processes with the left brain.

Project Management, understood through the lens of Iain McGilchrist's exploration of brain lateralization, is an art and a science; a right-brain art and a left-brain science. Effective Project Management requires an integrated approach, if not on the level of a Captain Kirk, then at least on the level of Mr. Spock or Mr. Scott.

Like the fox hunting the chicken while alert to the danger presented by the farmer, and the farmers protecting his or her flock from predators, project managers need to understand the risks and opportunities NOW, in the present, and simultaneously keep their eyes and the enterprise focused on the future they are creating. This is also true for line managers, and CEOs in every organization. Similarly, given that socio-political governance is essentially project management writ large; project management at the societal, national, and global scale, Chief Executives and other policy makers should focus on the present and simultaneously look 25, 50, 100 years into the future, planning, envisioning, and creating the world of their children's children's children.

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Lawrence J. Furman, MBA, PMP, is currently exploring leadership and innovation as an IT Manager at MACOM Linear Products and in “Adventures in Project Management,” which he plans to publish in 2024.

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1. Andersson, Benny and Ulvaeus, Bjorn, Thank You For the Music, originally released by the band Abba on The Album, 1977.
2. McGilchrist, Iain, Ways of Attending, How our Divided Brain Constructs the World, Routledge, 2019. ISBN: 978-1-78181-533-5
3. PMI, A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge, PMBOK Guide, 6th Ed, 2017, ISBN, 978-1-62825-184-5
4. Gelles, David, The Man Who Broke Capitalism, How Jack Welch gutted the Heartland and Crushed the Soul of Corporate America – and How to Undo His Legacy, Simon & Schuster, 2022, ISBN 978-1-98217-644-0
5. Star Trek, the original series, starring William Shattner as Captain Kirk, Leonard Nimoy as Mr. Spock, and others was originally broadcast on NBC television from September 8, 1966 though June 3, 1969.
6. While willing and able to work with Spock, McCoy made no bones about his distaste for Spock's pointed ears, green blood, and mixed Vulcan – Human parentage.
7. PMI, A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge, PMBOK Guide, Sixth Edition, © 2017, ISBN 978-1-62825-184-4, page 419.