It has been asserted that there are only two things of which we can be certain: death and taxes.

It isn’t true.

The only thing of which we can be certain is that certainty is impossible.

Some quantum physicists have concluded that reality is much stranger than the strangest of science fiction. Fred Alan Wolf, one of Doug DeCarlo’s favorite physicists and authors, says in his book Mind into Matter (2000) that atoms are believed to come into being only when we observe “them” – whatever “them” is.

And it has been know for a long time that the process of observing atomic particle affects what takes place. If you treat a photon as a particle, it behaves like one. If you treat it as a wave, it behaves like one.

Strange.

But this applies only to those pesky little things at the quantum level, doesn’t it?

No.

The same phenomenon has been found in observing interactions in groups. The observer’s presence, even when the observer is behind a one-way mirror so that the group members are not aware of his or her presence, affects group behavior. Maybe the only reality is quantum, whether it be micro or macro in nature.

The reason this is important is that our worldview determines how we approach things. Human beings would like the world to be a nice, tidy place where everything is deterministic and predictable. We all know this is not the reality, but we behave as if it were, and thereby we get into trouble. In project management, for example, we guess at how long a task will take, then plug these guesses into a scheduling software program, and out comes a critical path schedule that we then treat as deterministic! It is utter nonsense, because the software creates the illusion in the minds of senior managers that we have a precision that does not exist, and these false expectations lead to trouble for all of us in the long run. No matter how you look at it, activity durations are all probabilistic, not deterministic. This is another way of saying that we are living in a quantum project world, one where change and uncertainty are the norm. What is project management like under those circumstances?

There is another thing of which I am certain. Robert Wysocki writes in the Afterword to this book that this is not your father’s project management. In fact, it isn’t even your father’s projects. What I am certain of is that this book will either create huge excitement in the world of project management, or it will be branded heretical. After all, it may well be a paradigm shift, and as Thomas Kuhn has so convincingly shown in his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1996), new paradigms are usually ridiculed, resisted, and suppressed. Such may be the case with eXtreme Project Management. Not only does DeCarlo open a new paradigm, he provides the model and road map in the form of principles, values and tools that make it work. For projects that have a high uncertainty factor, he gives a real-world solution to the question: How do I keep the project in control and provide value in the face of volatility?

Whatever the case, you will never be the same after you read this book. No longer can you take solace in your deterministic critical path schedule, so elegant in its illusion of certainty. No longer will you be able to conclude that you know the status of the project because earned value analysis tells you the current state. No longer will you believe that a project can be managed in the sense of you being able to control it so that you can say with certainty that certain milestones will occur on certain dates.

Nope. It all depends on those little quantum gremlins – fuzzy things like information, communication, fields of influence, and other things that go bump in the night and can’t be seen, heard, tasted, touched, or smelled.

In a way that’s reminiscent of Margaret Wheatley’s classic business management book, Leadership and the New Science, this book dispels many of the commonly held myths about what it take to succeed on today’s change-ridden, volatile projects.

Ilya Prigogine (1997) wrote a book entitled The End of Certainty. Maybe this book should be titled The Death of Project Certainty – but, then, was there ever any certainty in the first place? Or perhaps we should call it The Death of Project Management As We Know It.

Vinton , Virginia August 2004

James P. Lewis President The Lewis Institute

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