This series targets three topics (decision making, strategic execution, and project management).  You will also find links to thinkers, books, tools and other resources.

Looking at the recent years’ book releases, we see a shifting from rigidly closed decision and management models, to open-ended approaches and analytical tools. Why?  Information now floods us; it’s a faster flux of events, and reactions from a global pool of players.

Dilemma of Project Management

Recall that Microsoft Project and the PMI BOK co-evolved in over 20 years, back when organizations were localized with simpler markets and competition.  MS Project still narrowly defines “issues” as scheduling.  Ironically, the more detailed the GANTT chart, the less likely it can be maintained for day-to-day management.

Management modeling’s  roots are in manufacturing whose processes tend to be linear and determinate.  We  dismiss messy “unquantifiables”.  But complexity and the change flux may not allow methodical analysis.   Newer product life cycles are shorter and discontinuous.

Irony of Making Decisions in a Surplus of Information

Closed “rational” analyses need to be supplemented,  and perhaps not by another model, but an approach, plus shorter decision feedback loops. Think of a stance, rather than a stand:  aligning to the most strategic goals, alert to changes, updates, and collaboration.

“What’s measured is what gets done,” true enough, but often it’s what cannot be measured that may render a plan undone. We forget that straight lines and metrics are human devices. Nature neither draws straight lines, nor follows our plans.

System Reliability and Accidents

With the internet and globalization, has come an unprecedented complexity.  With complexity,  some say,  “system accidents” are a certainty.   Do we step back enough for a larger context,  searching for what we don’t know that we don’t know. Until the the 2007 financial collapse, risk was a matter of actuarial hedging.  Perpetual motion  powered by technology and optimism:  the 1987 market’ “system accident” from programmed trading was a distant lesson.  Until the “lightning victory” in Iraq,  war was a matter of technology and logistics.

This blog series, then, is a search for ways to see the grays and not merely the binary; and for clearer values to navigate to, as goals must be ever more adaptive.