Introduction

I was thinking lately about the importance of perception and the relation of perception to reality. According to Wikipedia, perception is “the process of attaining awareness or understanding of sensory of information.” Reality on the other hand is “the state of things as they actually exist.” At first glance, reality appears to be what is real and perception may or may not be real, so reality is the most important of the two. In this article I explain why perception is most important aspect, why it must be managed, and how to improve you skill in doing so.

A Complicated Relationship
I first became aware of this relationship during a semester at The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) Masters of Systems Engineering program, although I have encountered the relationship throughout my life, although was ignorant to it and its importance. Part of the required reading for this course was “The Art Of Systems Architecting” by Mark W. Maier and Eberhardt Rechtin. For those who have not read this book or Rechtin’s work in general I highly recommend it. Although this book is geared towards engineers, systems engineering is a strange in that it is technical, however applied to management and life in general.

Prior to proceeding with this discussion I ask you to consider the following modified diagram which is based on Rechtin’s work in “The Art Of Systems Architecting”:

Figure 1. Perception Vs. Reality

When managing project I was always taught the importance of cost, schedule, technical performance, and risk. I will define each below as used in the context of this article:

1. Cost: The amount of money spent on a project.
2. Schedule: The amount of time given to complete a given project.
3. Performance: Specification of a given device (for example the speed of a car).
4. Risk: Impact and probability of an unplanned event occurring.

I will address risk more in an article concerning risk management at a later date. A whole book can be written on risk alone (actually many have been written) but it is outside the scope of this article, the important thing is that you remember it is always there and impossible to eliminate, but it can be minimized.

The other aspect that is interesting with regards to Figure 1 is the pulling nature of each attribute. Take cost, schedule, and technical performance for example. It is impossible to maximize all three. Consider the example of a car, it is impossible to build a car which maximizes performance, that is low cost, and the design of which is completed within an extremely short time frame. One can generally pick two attributes to maximize at the expense of another. For example, if high performance and an accelerated development timeline is desired than the cost in terms of dollars will increase greatly.