you come back quite in good shape from your 3 day construction summit, and more resolved than ever to get get the ‘reforms’ coming to more and more people.

Your notes on the Koskela and Howell paper were quite entertaining. I remember that in our first ‘conversation’ a couple of months ago, you told me about this paper and reading it was quite an experience for me. But, in retrospect (after fooling around with complexity theory, CAS and the like), I now find the paper a bit academic and leaving something unsaid, like a few down-to-earth solutions or advices to the common folks. Because of that, I don’t feel it is good material to close a sale either.
With respect to that, I would like to discuss the PMI issue that you mentioned, since I am quite active in this community. When I raised the question of obsolescence of the PMBoK model with fellow PMPs (making their living by spreading the PMBoK model to already confused crowds), I was looked upon as an heretic. The fact that I was talking such nonsense while being the editor of the PMI Montreal Chapter newsletter also worried quite a few of my fellow ‘deterministic managers’.
But, really, the question is not whether PMI is right or wrong. The issue is not PMI (the commercial entity), the issue is better project management in a complex world. And as you say, there are many people on official committees on the future (or the real present…) of project management, within the PMI, who also discuss the necessary shift from management-as-determining (or as-predicting)to management-as-adapting.
It is very important that, for people like me who keep and want to keep their association with PMI, while trying to reform project management, it is done by focussing on the needs and current ordeals of the real people that form PMI membership (it’s only 100,000 people, but it is still quite a few persons on your back if you start questioning everything they do), not by focussing on the PMI current branding (which is irrelevant anyway to the every day problems that managers face).
I have started to address the issue of management-as-adapting around me, not by talking obsolescence anymore, but by talking about our complex world, the reality of constant change and the possible virtues of self-adapting-organizing project teams, as demonstrated in agile SW development processes…in brief by offering possible solutions to every ‘not-controlling-anything-anymore manager’. This way, I see less worried-angried eyes and more amused-playful smiles. I guess that for them, visualizing their project teams or organizations as self-organizing flights of Canadian geese or school of multicolor tropical fishes evolving happily in full harmony is a better prospect than feeling obsolete with nowhere to go.
I guess I started to use my own professed medicine on me, management-as-adapting, in reaction to negative changes around me caused by an adversarial approach at reforming my fellow project managers and their organization. I started to walk the talk and it makes quite a difference not only in advocating a new approach but in living it and starting to see it in action. Just a small cautionary tale that I hope makes some sense and will be of some use. Salut !

The alternative to reductionist approaches such as WBS is aggregation. Take a funnel (breadth first) approach to projects instead of a tunnel (depth first) approach. Those of us in the north country understand ice sculpture contests. Start with several big blocks of ice, do the big cuts and let the general shape emerge. Refine gradually, increasing tolerances, first to the arms, legs, head, and so on, then to the detailing.

If you think about sculpture instead of machines, then you can see how emergence works. It beats flocking birds and ant colonies….

Mary

The funnel vs tunnel approach is something I use a lot while tackling project portfolio management issues; but the idea of using the funnel analogy for one project is new to me (usually after the portfolio selection funnel, my projects fall into a big pipeline-tunnel–I guess, as you propose I ought to keep a few single-project-size funnels to explain how to start them). Makes my day !