1.1.1 Project Leaders and Related Fields
Before your expectations are raised too high, I need to issue a disclaimer. This course is not going to eliminate all people-related surprises from your projects. However, it will help you anticipate, avoid, and cope with them when they occur. I cannot think of any project problem that is not people-related, by the way. Can you?
Many of the project leaders I know come from technical fields like engineering and information systems. It is unusual for students in technical fields to study psychology, sociology, political science, or anthropology. There are several reasons for that.
People with technical interests tend not to be interested in human behavior and they avoid these types of classes. When I lived in Sweden, my son attended an English language math and science high school. There were two separate curriculums--physical sciences and social sciences. Students took one or the other by choice. The Swedes were surprised that my son was taking both in his high school. In that school, it was a black and white issue.
Technical curriculums tend to be full of technical courses and allow few, if any, electives in courses concerning human behavior.
Few U.S. high schools teach, let alone require, courses in human behavior. It is common to hear complaints about the curriculums in the schools, but the criticisms tend to favor more mathematics, science, and writing rather than a need for more courses to improve human understanding. This seems odd considering that the most important things that we do in our lives involve interactions with other human beings. It may be odd, but it is unlikely to change given all of the demands on educators.
Behavior in others which is different from our own is seen as deviant. Whether we are thinking about patterns of behavior common within our family, our religion, our ethnic group, our country, and so on, if it is different from ours, it is strange and seems wrong. In other words, we all think that we know how to behave with others and if something goes wrong, it is not our fault. We have to force ourselves to look beyond our own habits and open our minds to understanding the ideas, beliefs, and habits underlying the behavior of others.
Technical experts tend to rely on specific tools and concrete measures. To research human behavior and individual differences, we use abstract tools and statistical techniques which supply means and medians that are not as concrete as the tools that we use for technical measurement. This concerns people who rely on numbers for understanding the world around them. Some give up on understanding human behavior. I know some technical experts who simply assume the worst about other people (and life), as a mean of coping with unpredictable events.