The Secret Life Of Projects, Part 3

David Schmaltz is a project manager in Takoma Park, Maryland.

  Leadership   ProjectsAtWork  

Projects have their share of fertile fallacies, and the profession of project work might be encapsulated into this small insight, that our theories of how things are supposed to work are probably wrong, and wrong in ways that we could not possibly understand yet.

"Anyone who believes that small things can't make a huge difference has never tried to sleep with a mosquito in the room." — Norm Kerth

The secret about project life most closely guarded by practitioners discloses too much to be openly gabbled around, for this secret discredits anyone espousing it. Projects seem to live in an ever-expanding world, not a steadily shrinking one. Attend a conference and the keynoter will carry a vitae claiming credit for global successes, and you or I could be excused for feeling kind of insignificant in comparison to their vast experience. 

We could also be excused for concluding that it doesn't much matter what we do, because by the time a practitioner's career passes middle age, it's damned difficult to sustain the youthful fiction that insists upon ascribing causes to effects. We know better. Or our experiences should have taught us better. And these experiences encourage what might be mistaken for a real reticence to talk when we've just run out of clever things to say.

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