John Connor, PMP®

Yes, yes, I know that this blog’s title has some explaining to do, primarily along the lines of “Are we really going to start awarding honorary PMP®s to fictional characters?”, along with “Well, if we are, why on earth would we start with the protagonist from The Terminator movies?” I can explain.
For those members of GTIM Nation who were born after 1984 (the first reference to John Connor, even though he does not actually make an appearance) or after 1991 (his first actual appearance, in the sequel Terminator 2, Judgement Day), John Connor is the person that leads (will lead?) the humans in their ultimately successful counter-offensive to Skynet and its killer robots, known as Terminators, after they have turned the world into a violent, dystopian nightmare. As Connor and his forces close in on Skynet, it sends some of these killer robots back in time in order to stop Connor from being conceived in the first place (The Terminator), or growing out of adolescence (Terminator 2, Judgement Day). As with several movie franchises that feature time travel, other “futures” with different ultimate outcomes crop up; but, in at least one of the timelines, Connor is successful in either preventing Skynet from coming on-line in the first place or, having come on-line and nearly destroying humanity, leading the forces that finally, well, terminate it.
Meanwhile, Back In The Project Management World…
I have to snicker whenever I see Project Managers listed among the professions that are considered likely candidates for replacement by Artificial Intelligence, or AI. As GTIM Nation knows, my particular management science take on the Pareto Principle is that the 80^th percentile best managers who have access to only 20% of the information needed to obviate a given decision will be consistently out-performed by the 20^th percentile worst managers who have access to 80% of the information so needed. So, with critical PM-oriented information streams becoming more and more commonplace even as they are getting easier to generate, that means that even an asset manager will be able to make the optimal PM decisions on a consistent basis in the near future, right? Well, no.
Notice that I’m not even attempting to speculate on the outcome of a 100% information available scenario. That’s because it doesn’t exist, and it doesn’t exist because the future cannot be quantified, despite the risk managers’ (no initial caps) attempts to do just that. As Dwight Eisenhower famously said, “Plans are worthless, but planning is everything.”[i] The difference between these two seemingly identical terms is filled by the PM. We PMs refer to the original plan as the baseline – scope, cost, and schedule, the notorious Triple Constraint – but I have yet to encounter a baseline that either remained unchanged throughout the Project’s life cycle, or accurately captured all of the variances that the Project would encounter. This is because those baselines are static, whereas actual Project execution is a highly dynamic process. The baselines are indispensable when it comes to measuring cost and schedule performance, but they simply can’t capture the events and changing circumstances that emerge that create a barrier to successfully attaining the particulars in the scope baseline on-time, on-budget.
Add to that the fact that, even with 80% of the information needed, a workable decision or strategy is by no means guaranteed, let alone the optimal one. Hindsight is 20/20 goes the cliché, due to the fact that managerial decisions are almost always made with incomplete information at the time they need to be executed. Making key decisions with incomplete information is the stock and trade of PMs everywhere and, if those decisions stand the test of time – which is to say, they still make sense even after all of the relevant information is made available – then that PM’s judgement is shown to be sound.
But enough of evaluating this on management science theory grounds – how does this appear in the real film world? Well, consider that the aforementioned John Connor was fighting against a supercomputer, one that had access to virtually all of the stored data on the planet, a computer that was able to design, build, test, and deploy an army of killer robots that were practically impervious to any available weapons, and Connor still managed to come out on top, despite having vastly fewer and inferior resources at his disposal. Artificial Intelligence largely operates on a presumption that the world operates in a linear fashion, with occasional random anomalies disturbing a somewhat predictable path. The truth, of course, is the exact opposite: the world operates in such a non-linear fashion as to make the predictably linear occurrences rare, save in those areas where life is not a factor.
And so, for demonstrating that AI doesn’t stand a chance against a human in a dynamic environment (even in a fictional setting), I would like to nominate John Connor for an honorary PMP®. Do I hear a second?



[i] Retrieved from https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/11/18/planning/ on June 2, 2026, 20:09 MDT.