Back to the PM Future!

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].

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Topics: Communications Management, Knowledge Management, Lessons Learned

To look into the future--more often than not--you must first look back, into the past. Because it is only by looking at the past that you can see where the future is leading you. But if we are to do that, and look ahead, to envision what the future of project management might look like 10, 20 or even 100 years from now, looking at how the past envisioned the future may help point us in the right direction and show us where that journey into the future is headed. So what did the future look like, in the past?

Just over 100 ago, the English novelist E. M. Forster published a short story called The Machine Stops. Forster’s futuristic tale is not as well known as George Orwell’s 1984 or Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, but like those more famous novels Forster’s vision of the future is pessimistically dystopian: that the inexorable advance of technology will eventually lead to it becoming the master--if not the destroyer--of mankind, and not its servant.

Although Forster claimed he wrote his story as an antidote to “one of the earlier heavens of H.G. Wells”, his future is, for the most part, benignly beneficial in the multifarious comforts and conveniences it bestows on mankind. For any writer (this one included), it never pays to be too specific about the details of what the future will look like. But as with most futuristic fiction, …

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