A Cunning Plan

Ian Whittingham, PMP is director of Calixo Consulting, providing project and program management expertise from initiation through to implementation, covering business transformation, workflow process re-engineering, and enterprise data integration. He is a regular contributor to ProjectManagement.com. You may contact Ian directly at [email protected].

 

Whenever I look down a list of recommended reading for a PMP exam prep class or a graduate degree course in project management, I am always struck by the absence of a text that ought to be required reading for project managers everywhere: Homer's Odyssey, the adventures of polymetis Odysseus on his voyage home to Ithaca after the fall of Troy.

There are few modern equivalents to the wanderings of Odysseus, yet one encounters his resourceful spirit in the most unlikely of ventures. More importantly, the behavior that he is most associated with always finds a way to win the day--or in our terms, successfully deliver the project.

But what was perceived as a virtue in Odysseus carries a pejorative sense today and more often than not arouses suspicion and mistrust when observed in others. If we see cunning in a project team member, we are more likely to keep a very close eye on them rather than promote their behavior as something to be emulated by the rest of the team. However, that is exactly what I am advocating here: We need to cultivate a culture of cunning in our project teams.

Most dictionary definitions of cunning emphasize its primary meaning as something that is characterized by deceptiveness or someone who is skilled in the art of deception and guile. But the word's secondary meaning balances that disparaging sense with the virtue that characterized Odysseus's …

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