The impact of personality on the success of project delivery

On Wednesday 18 September 2019, we held our latest event in conjunction with Turner and Townsend at their very impressive offices overlooking St Pauls Cathedral in London.

The evening began with an overview of the APM Enabling Change SIG to wet peoples’ appetite, this was followed by a fantastic talk by Paul Erricker from The Project Academy on our thinking style and its impact when leading change. We talked about cognitive styles and coping to work with others with different cognitive styles and how that can be done for a time but is not sustainable. This really got people thinking about why they work better with some people more than with others, and why they prefer to work with those people that they just click with.

Paul discussed KAI which stands for Kirton Adaption Innovation which highlights where adaptors and innovators and the different traits they have, showing a scale of where you would typically sit, most people have an element of both. It’s important to have some of both in a team as pure innovators would generate great ideas but may not necessarily deliver within any structure. He made recommendations on how to frame and discuss ideas with both types of people.

The session was really lively and engaging and helped people to see why the way they think is important when dealing with change. We are looking at arranging another similar session early in the new year so please keep an eye out on the APM events page.

Paul kindly made his presentation available for viewing.