Freaky Project Management (Part 2)

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].

  Communications Management   Knowledge Management   Lessons Learned   Risk Management  

If you ask someone what happened on the night of April 14, 1912, chances are they will know the answer, even without the help of Google. The word “night” is the giveaway. Bad stuff always happens at night. And something bad did happen that night when RMS Titanic hit an iceberg and sank in the frigid waters of the north Atlantic, 375 miles south of Newfoundland, with the loss of over 1,500 lives.

For the unsinkable Titanic to have met with such a catastrophic event was considered a freak accident, something that should never have occurred but somehow did. In the intervening years, many explanations have been proposed to explain how the unsinkable luxury liner became as sinkable as any other boat out on the ocean.

In seeking to understand what happened, the question that most people asked was, “How did an iceberg sink the Titanic?” However, two years ago the British historian Tim Maitland turned the question around and asked, “What were the conditions that caused the Titanic to hit an iceberg?” In redefining the problem, he came much closer to understanding what actually happened that night by demonstrating the crucial role that freak weather conditions played in the sinking of the liner.

Think like a freak
Freakishnessis defined by the dictionary as unusualness as a consequence of not being well known. Yet it is not the …

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