Guessing is not a strategy: How to build decision velocity with AI and real-time data
June 10, 2026 | Live Webinar
Running on New Rails (Part 1)
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].
As technologies emerge, evolve, mature and then decay, they sometimes create, in their wake, constraints that persist in contingent and unforeseen ways. Ideally, technical standards should be grounded in objective criteria that are ultimately derived from rational principles having a basis in either empirical phenomena, or in the axiomatic rules of mathematics. But the reality, of course, is always a little different whenever irrational homo sapiens is involved.
If the principle that “man is the measure of the universe” was seminal to the achievements of Renaissance thinkers and artists such as Leonardo da Vinci, then one might argue that “horse”, rather than “man”, was the defining measure for the pioneering engineers and entrepreneurs of the Industrial Age. And it was the emergence, acceptance and adoption of a new infrastructure based on that measure that created profound and pervasive disruption in transforming European and American society from its formerly agrarian basis to a newly industrialized one as the 19th century progressed.
The plausibility of historical causality that underpins the following anecdote has certainly helped to give it longevity and wide circulation on the Internet. And although the story’s authenticity buckles when the facts on which its narrative runs are subjected to close scrutiny, like …
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