Heuristics for Better Project Leadership: Teasing Out Tacit Knowledge

Heuristics are fast-and-frugal rules of thumb, used to simplify complex decisions. This article explores how heuristics may help improve project leadership. First, it identifies two schools of thought in scholarship about heuristics. Second, it explains why heuristics work, based on Occam’s razor. Third, it outlines five steps for teasing out project leaders’ tacit heuristics, with examples of how the steps were employed in leadership training at Oxford University. The five steps emphasize the role of Aristotelian phronesis in developing effective heuristics. Fourth, the article discusses heuristics that drove success at Pixar and how we may learn from these. Finally, areas for further research are identified. Readers, whether practitioners or scholars, are encouraged to develop and improve their own leadership heuristics and guidance is given for how to do this.