Those racy commercials look so unbelievable and comical - a scrawny half-man-half-boy drowns himself in a chemical that promises to be the Aphrodisiac Ultimate, and in comes flocking an army of semi-nude women and mob him comprehensively and the Axe Defect is complete! The chemical instantly obliterates all imperfections and turns a below-average Joe into a rocking party-animal Casanova! Well, several project managers also suffer from The Axe Defect!
Urban Dictionary defines The Axe Effect as:
The effect achieved when a large group of ignorant and insecure pubescent boys attempt to cover up their smell with excessive quantities of Axe while at the same time forgetting to bathe regularly. The resulting smell is a combination of that of severe B.O. and that of a severe chemical spill.
Desired dramatic effects of the commercial aside, there is clearly an attempt to sex-ify things here a bit, and we can certainly remove the innuendos here by using milder terms like “sugercoating” or even the biz jargon “goldplating”, but since this commercial is all about pleasing the Almighty Eros, I might as use a more relevant term here 
. Not only do we see many a pitiable morons falling for such outrageous performance promises, this even led to a hilarious piece in Faking News, and saw many more gullible again falling for that story too! And judging by the increasing number of these ads, I think they are working like a charm! So, that brings us to the uber-important question: why are people so desperate about their rock-bottom social esteem that they are willing to try anything to uplift it, or they genuinely believe that is their only way to salvation, regaining their lost mojo, their passport to social nirvana! This promise of instantly curing us of all our imperfections is not only timeless, it is also a thriving business! And sadly, it extends into all realms of life, including project management. I call this as the Axe Defect!
Projects are complex social structures that have a life (ok, some actually are larger than life itself, and some also have an afterlife!). There is a constant struggle between the enabling forces and the constraining forces. Enabling forces includes proper scoping and change control methods, effective estimation methods, scheduling and planning, adequate management oversight and control over the execution, and so on. Similarly, constraining forces include unmanaged uncertainties, unresolved issues, unaddressed dependencies, unmitigated (and quite often unidentified) risks, “unknown unknowns” and so on. In a way, they are like the yin-yang of a project. They both always co-exist, and are interdependent on each other - constraining forces are not really negative in nature, rather they help uncover potential issues that could jeopardize the project. A timely action planning helps strengthen the enabling forces. A balanced or a well-run project is able to systemically address and eliminate most, if not all, constraining forces not just in the beginning of a project, but throughout the lifecycle of a project. That doesn’t mean a well-run project doesn’t have such constraining forces - it just means there is a process in place to systematically collect, analyze, prioritize and address them.
A project manager’s job typically involves balancing the yin and the yang of a project. However, not everyone is equally proficient in this balancing act. Project managers come in all shapes, sizes and shades. In the initial few years, when they are still quite wet behind the years, there is a strong tendency to overdo things (i.e., apply all the theory to the first problem they come across ). They try extremely hard, often pushing themselves and the team up the roof and are not always very successful. Their intent is not bad, just that their methods are not very refined. Just think of it this way why newbie golfers are not allowed to as much as even wander on the greens and pretty much confined to the driving range until they have learnt the skills to tee off without digging up a pound of mud! Unfortunately, there are no driving ranges for rookie project managers, and the real-life projects become their lab! Nothing wrong about it, except that real-life presents more than fair share of challenges, failures and disappointments. So, when the dirt eventually hits the roof, all hell breaks loose. In the face of high expectations and mounting pressure to deliver, there is a tendency to fall prey to the Axe Defect and gloss over the facts. Sometimes that happens by selectively using metrics to project a healthy image of the project, sometimes it involves using the newest “silver bullet” in the hope that it will cure the project of all maladies. Irrespective, the Axe Defect just makes it worse than what is already is. If people buy the new story, it might only end up deferring the catastrophe for now, but make it more disastrous and costly when it eventually strikes back. If people don’t buy the story, the project manager might further lose his credibility (first incompetence and now attempt to mislead!). Still, it surprises me that project managers, even the experienced variety, so often fall prey and instead of focusing on holistic treatment of the troubled project, go for short cuts that promise to give an instant facelift, but in reality, only sink the project further.
Over the last few decades, we have seen dozens of travelling salesmen (read “consultants”) offering all kinds of snake oil (read “methodologies”). The product labels change (and sometimes, they don’t even change that!), but they pretty much recycle the old commonsense and into their jargon. They trade in the Axe Defect, targeting the new and the gullible by promising 10x improvements in half the time. They are the second-biggest enemy of your project’s success. And you who believes in the purported supernatural powers of the Axe Defect is the number one enemy!
