The unknown and the unexpected: inevitable irruptions of reality

If today, nothing is going as planned, if you are wondering "Why is everything going off the rails?", this post is for you. It may be the literature on project management that can give you some perspective 😊

Quick reminder: project management is the discipline that consists of transforming visions into tangible realities. It is, for example, creating a product or service starting from a simple written specification, to deliver a living, functional, operational result. The added value of project management therefore lies partly in its ability to navigate through the unknown and the unexpected.

But then, how to face them? How to overcome them?

The traditional management bias suggests that the key lies in anticipation and total control. A good project manager, according to this perspective, would never be confronted with the unexpected & the unknown because he would have identified and eliminated all the risks upstream. Nothing would escape him.

Fortunately, perhaps, reality is less smooth and fixed! Quite the contrary: project management itself now recognizes that the unknown and the unexpected are inevitable. It recognizes that their emergence is part of reality and integrates them into its philosophy of action.

Here are two examples:

#1 - The risks called 'the unknown unknowns'

In risk analysis, this refers to situations that the project manager himself cannot foresee. No project is safe from unknown unknowns. The project manager knows that they can burst in at any time, and that it is impossible for him to envisage them in advance, so distant, far-fetched, absurd would they seem at that moment. The chief engineer who would decide to drop everything overnight, a hurricane, COVID... who could foresee such 'tiles'?

#Murphy's Law

'Anything that can go wrong will go wrong' – this is the principle on which a number of budgeting & planning methods are built.

A critical part for a project can arrive late? It will arrive late.

A quality problem that arises during the team's vacation? Nothing abnormal.

Conclusions

#1 Reality often surpasses fiction

No, it is not always possible to know. No, it is not always possible to anticipate. “Life is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you are going to get.”

Fighting against this state of affairs would be counterproductive. On the contrary, it is about making the unpredictable and the uncertain a certain starting point to better adapt to them.

#2 - Let's not be afraid to talk about it and raise awareness among all stakeholders!

Since the unexpected and the unknown regularly thwart all predictions, let us learn to name them without fear in order to better take charge of them. Recognizing their possibility is still too often wrongly associated with weakness. Let us put an end to the myth of the all-powerful Man, to rehabilitate the more virtuous and pragmatic idea that we cannot control everything, but that we can, on the other hand, adapt to it with agility.

#2 - Let's be proactive. Let's think ahead: "What have we planned in case of an unforeseen event? Do we have an activatable plan B? And our plan C? What is the budget? What are the resources?"

Let us write down our management of exceptional risks as precisely as possible.

Let's learn to think, write and organize the unknown and the unexpected in concrete terms. Let's integrate them into our initial approach, so that they no longer belong to the realm of urgency, stress or worse, failure.