Worrying Productively About Complexity

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].

  Complexity   Governance   Knowledge Management   Lessons Learned   Strategy  

Kafkaesque is not an adjective that figures prominently in the project management lexicon. In fact, I can’t recall hearing it used in a project management context. Its absence is probably because the strangely bizarre or incomprehensibly illogical events that occur in Franz Kafka’s stories are rarely encountered in real life.

But the uneasiness that one experiences in a Kafkaesque situation is, perhaps, something that some project managers may have felt for themselves even without being able to pinpoint precisely the cause of their unease. And that unease can be telling you something important about the state of your project if you know what to do with it.

Digging into the problem
Franz Kafka’s The Burrow, like his more well-know short story Metamorphosis, is a parable whose meaning can be interpreted in different ways. The narrator of the story is an unidentified subterranean animal (usually identified as a mole) who describes in great detail the lengths to which it goes in order to secure its home (the burrow) against intrusion and attack from another, unnamed predator.

The animal’s obsessive elaboration of a complex system of tunnels is driven by an ever-present anxiety that--at any moment--the unnamed beast will break into its lair. Perceived weaknesses in the burrow’s intricate defenses are inspected and worried over. No …

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