Guessing is not a strategy: How to build decision velocity with AI and real-time data
June 10, 2026 | Live Webinar
Pick Your Battles
Mark Mullaly is president of Interthink Consulting Incorporated, an organizational development and change firm specializing in the creation of effective organizational project management solutions. Since 1990, it has worked with companies throughout North America to develop, enhance and implement effective project management tools, processes, structures and capabilities. Mark was most recently co-lead investigator of the Value of Project Management research project sponsored by PMI. You can read more of his writing at markmullaly.com.
Sometimes you have to demonstrate a better way of doing things before change becomes possible. But just how unorthodox an approach to managing projects is acceptable? Well, it might depend on how unorthodox the challenges are. And no real change is going to take hold unless there is strong organizational acceptance.
In response to a recent column, one reader posted a unique question to my assertion that organizations should establish clear objectives and leave it to the project manager and team to determine the best path to achieve it: “How unorthodox a path is acceptable?”
While the optimal answer might be “as unorthodox as it takes,” this would ignore the reality for many, if not most, organizations that there are constraints within which we still have to operate. For the individual who posed the question, this included the fact that his organization’s priority is to get the project done in the minimum amount of time, with messes cleaned up after implementation. He went on to describe an environment where dates are arbitrary, plans are stored in peoples’ grey matter, status updates are verbal, and project success is conferred on any effort that actually completes, regardless of what is implemented.
While the description above may appear too fanciful to be true, based upon my experience, there are many organizations that do …
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