[Ailist] Suboski & Renton AI paper on mood/narrative to improve project management

[Lionel Boxer]

I read again last night Suboski & Renton (2007) that Howard Suboski distributed on this list a few months ago.  This is really an excellent paper about an important issue for industry.

I am preparing a paper that draws on this.  Initial abstract below - any ideas or contributions would be MOST welcome.

POSITIONING BETTER PROJECT MANAGEMENT

Suboski & Renton (2004) show that human-centric - rather than mechanistic or analytic - factors are most responsible for project success.   Suboski & Renton (2007) suggests how executives can create an environment that harnesses human-centric leadership practices to facilitate project management success.  Informed (in part) by Searle (1995), Suboski & Renton (2007) call for project managers to create appropriate moods by introducing narratives that contribute to people feeling good and enabling them to act in ways that benefit their project.  Their intention is that project leaders engage in a full range of discursive behaviour that "produce(s) an embodiment of the narrative in people (Suboski & Renton 2007, p.10)

Positioning theory (Harre 1991), also informed (in part) by Searle's work, concerns the discursive production of selves.  Boxer (2003 ... 2007) draws on Harre (1991) and others to create a theory of mood that contributes to Suboski & Renton (2004 and 2007) by providing a framework for leaders to derive their mood-aligning narratives.  As called for by Suboski & Renton (2007, p. 14), Boxer (2003 – a chapter in Harre 2003) demonstrates a positioning theory approach for assessing the mood of quality management systems with positioning theory.

This paper will fuse the ideas of Suboski & Renton (2004 and 2007) and Boxer (2003 … 2007).  It is intended to provide a tool for project managers to align the mood of their project team with the project objectives.

Some of my publications are at http://intergon.net/phd/dev.htm


Lionel Boxer CD PhD MBA BTech(IndEng) - 0411267256
Research Fellow - lionel.boxer at rmit.edu.au
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