Don't Eat the Marshmallow in Project Management

Don't Eat the Marshmallow in Project Management

I have written this article to highlight the importance of delayed gratification in project management. Generally, delayed gratification is associated with resisting a smaller but more immediate reward in order to receive a larger or more enduring reward later. A person's ability to delay gratification relates to other similar skills, such as patience, impulse control, self-control, and willpower. I can think of no better way to illustrate the subject of delayed gratification than by referring to the seminal research on this subject.

The now-famous "marshmallow experiment," was conducted by Walter Mischel in the 1960’s and 1970’s at Stanford University. Mischel and his colleagues were interested in strategies that preschool children used to resist temptation. They presented four-year-olds with a marshmallow and told the children that they had two options: ring a bell at any point to summon the experimenter and eat the marshmallow, or wait until the experimenter returned about 15 minutes later, and earn two marshmallows. The message was "small reward now, bigger reward later." Some children broke down and ate the one marshmallow, whereas others were able to delay gratification and earn the coveted two marshmallows. In follow-up experiments, Mischel found that children were able to wait longer if they used certain distraction techniques (such as covering their eyes, hiding under the desk, singing songs, or imagining pretzels instead of the marshmallow in front of them), or if they changed the way they thought about the marshmallow (focusing on its similarity to a cotton ball rather than on its gooey, delectable taste).

The children who waited longer, when re-evaluated as teenagers and adults, demonstrated a striking array of advantages over their peers. As teenagers, they had higher SAT scores, social competence, self-assuredness, and self-worth and were rated by their parents as more mature, better able to cope with stress, more likely to plan ahead, and more likely to use reason. They were less likely to have conduct disorders or high levels of impulsivity, aggressiveness, and hyperactivity. As adults, the high delayers were less likely to have drug problems or other addictive behaviors, get divorced, or become overweight. Each minute that a preschooler was able to delay gratification translated to a 0.2% reduction in Body Mass Index 30 years later. Follow-up studies continued to confirm that the ability to resist temptation early in life translated into persistent benefits.

When you employ the characteristic of delayed gratification in project management, you will raise the odds of resisting the temptation to act on the expedient in favor of the effective. You resist the pressure to shortcut project planning and rush into implementation. You resist the pressure to accept yet another requirement or feature without first assessing the impact. Your resist the pressure to move forward with a project without full support from stakeholders or full funding. Delayed gratification in project management can serve as your compass to guide you to toward more long term strategic objectives and fewer short term tactical objectives. And, one of my favorite strategic long term project management objectives is to help the organization, and executives, act for project success.

There are many well understood actions executives could be taking that would raise the odds of success for the projects in their organization. If I am a project management employee in that organization, and if I have adopted the perspective of delayed gratification, then I will not hesitate to work with my executives to help them understand the actions I need them to take for project success. I will then help implement those actions as well. I will not eat the one marshmallow now, but instead delay gratification so I can eat more marshmallows later.

I have included the subject of delayed gratification in my recently published book titled "How To Get Executives To Act For Project Success." It is available on Amazon.



Great article! Thank you for sharing these methods.

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Alankar Karpe

Project and Program Management at Wipro

6y

Very interesting read, Mike! Thanks for sharing

Alfonso Guerra

Transforming software teams to 10x performance, at higher quality, and out-maneuver their competitors.

6y

Indeed! Thanks for the article. I've become more attentive to this mindset of delayed gratification over the past few years. Thank you for adding more justification to my decision-making thought processes.

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