What do we do when evidence conflicts with our beliefs? For example, if we believe that a project will be successful, how do we respond if the project begins to fail? 1 was recently made aware1 of the work of behavioral psychologist Leon Festinger at Stanford during the 1950s. Festinger explained that we tend to ignore the evidence that conflicts with our beliefs (especially if we hold them strongly) until it becomes overwhelming. Only then will we change our beliefs. Festinger's theory (he called it the "theory of cognitive dissonance" [4]) explains one of the most confounding findings of a recent Cutter Consortium survey on software project failures. It appears that the stage of software development in which an organization most commonly realizes that a project is failing is the end of the development schedule. Why would an organization wait that long? Surely, the signs of failure must have been quite clear much earlier.
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