I watched this week a video tape of a presentation entitled Project Management for Wicked Projects by Don Willerton of the Los Alamos National Lab. Don has researched many of the most popular project management trainings, methodologies, and approaches. His presentation rates them on their applicability in conditions of uncertainty. Since Don works as a code physicist on research software projects, his career has been centered around coping with uncertainty.

Not surprisingly, Don finds traditional project management approaches inapplicable to what he does. Why? To paraphrase that Zen master, they seem to have an insatiable need to "mess with things." Control is achieved by creating a set of knowns (or as-ifs) and then managing as if these were the project. I noticed that every technique carries vestiges of this assumption, as if unknowns were in need of reform, as if "messing" with them would help.

Some strategies suggest tiny time boxes. Others focus upon second guessing over inflated estimates, but each has its strategy for turning uncertainty into something different. What each seem to miss is the possibility that uncertainty does not necessarily need fixing. It is not just a primitive form of certainty. It is a different animal.

I know that engineers are trained to pursue predictability as a foundation for confidence. A system is known when it becomes predictable. This holds true for all but unpredictable systems. These are known for their unpredictability. In these situations, a different strategy must be embraced.

Don reported that in his career, most of his projects have done something other than what he predicted they would do. He also reported that most of his projects have been successful. They were not successful, as classic project management strategies insist, because they turned out as he originally expected them to turn out. They were successful because his confidence was not dependent upon certainty but upon his ability to not mess with the uncertainty. He could then respond to things as they really were, enlisting himself and his customers in the endless, adaptive dance that makes us not masters of predictability but masters of ourselves; and so masters of our projects.

"You are the most powerful project management tool you will ever use."