I like a comparison to religion, with which project management formal models share a lot. Religion is actually dispensable. If you choose to be atheist, you'll be fine. You don't *need* religion to function. Or even any sort of formalized proxy like comic-book fandom.
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But project management is... not actually dispensable. Things do fall apart on you if you don't manage projects. Risks and fragilities accumulate and blow up on you. So just because all PM approaches are religions doesn't mean you can be "atheist" and just dispense with it all.
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Which isn't stopping me from trying... I'm neglecting these things furiously.
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An early example of "you don't need project management" philosophy is creative procrastination theory. Don't fight it. Get to things when they actually break, etc. Unfortunately, CP theory is only true in narrow, relatively safe areas with bounded downside.
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My working hypothesis is that project management is the "caring" layer in a 3-layer management pyramid that goes
Truth (long-term, enduring, >1y)
Caring (medium-term transient, > 1 week)
Pleasure (short-term transient < 1 day)
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To be sustainable, work has to be 1) grounded in truth long term, 2) grounded in caring medium-term 3) grounded in pleasure short-term.
1 and 3 are easy to do because they carry independent "caring" fuel. But 2 is caring that allows compounding over time.
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If you only had 1 and 3, you'd have reflection sessions of philosophizing where you'd uncover powerful and satisfying truths, and work sessions where you'd have fun producing small chunks of work. But without 2, you can't accumulate the integration of reflection and action.
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The result should be familiar if you're like me. Random acts of philosophy in the "air game" and random acts of tinkering in the "ground game" but a hard time getting it to accumulate, and compound interest/network effects going.
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"Automating the middle stuff" is really code for "automate caring." Which sounds like a joke by emo types about techbro types, but is actually possible. You can build/arrange tech to do the "caring" for you, where the maintenance of the tech itself is a low-level pleasure.
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An example is a well-appointed workshop space with all the tools and equipment at hand. It creates a potential field and has an entropy to its state. Once you have it set up, low level clean-up/maintenance (cleaning, putting things back) sustains its ability to "automate caring."
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As I'm learning with all my maker dabbling, so long as the workbench area is well-maintained and orderly, I can do everything with just 1+3 activities (idle sketching on paper/whiteboard vs. hands-on work). It's when the work area gets messy/dirty that things fall apart.
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This potential field approach applies to kitchens/cooking too. And surprisingly, to dogfighting in fighter planes. Boyd's big contribition before OODA was E-M theory (energy maneuverability) which can be understood as "taking the project management out of dogfighting skills"
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Traditional dogfighting before Boyd reformed it at Nellis fighter tactics school when he was instructor was based in basically cookbooks of "maneuvers" based in nothing more than accumulated wisdom/superstition from 30 years of dueling in the air. There was no real theory to it.
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Boyd mastered that metis, but then went on to theorize and systematize it with physics. E-M theory reframes fighter tactics as energy and entropy management. This not only shapes how you fight (fast transients etc) but how you design airplanes.
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E-M theory led to understanding why, statistically, certain airplanes routinely beat other airplanes, regardless of the skills of "ace" pilots. And how to design planes to be winning. Gaps in E-M theory led on to the further innovations in the OODA loop theory.
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In fact, fast transients is an artifact of OODA theory rather than E-M theory. Boyd got there by applying E-M theory to sabres vs. migs in Korea and realizing the predictions were wrong because the model didn't include how the UX (stick, visibility, affected transients)
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So the way Boydian theory "automates" project management is a) transpose a domain of tactical heuristic metis onto a first-principles ground so a well-designed potential field replaces a body of arbitrary playbook knowledge b) fill the remaining "human factor" gaps with UX design
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The formula to automate a project management "caring" layer is simple to state but hard to execute:
1. Separate the PM into "science" and "human factors" components
2. Build a potential-field theory of the "science" part to get rid of the arbitrary playbooks
3. UX the rest
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Curiously, this formula goes back to... Newton! Newtonian mechanics is really annoying to apply directly. It's like project management. Lagrangian and Hamilitonian methods are technically equivalent, but far easier to use because they are grounded in potential theories.
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You have to be "clever" to solve classical mechanics problems using Newtonian methods, and I kinda prided myself on my cleverness through high school/college. But in grad school, my intermediate dynamics/advanced dynamics prof taught us a very important principle: don't be clever
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Using Newton means getting clever with coordinate frames and algebraic manipulations. But 80% of it can be automatically done by Lagrangian formulation. Occasionally you still have to use Newton's laws directly to incorporate tricky constraints and non-conservative forces.
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But as you get older and less good at being clever, applying Newton's laws no longer feels like virtuoso pleasure at doing an unnecessary difficult thing. You prefer plug-and-play brain dead easy of lagrangian equations. And as problems get harder, you *need* them to solve at all
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Spoiler alert: the story ended with pure automation. CAD packages that can do all classical mechanics calculations for you are descended from Lagrangian version of Newton's laws (specifically a very modern 20th century version called Kane's equations that's ideal for computers)
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General project management is currently at the Newton level. Or pre-Boyd fighter tactics level. It needs to get to the Kane's equations/E-M+OODA level. And the effect of getting there will feel like "automating caring" (2) so you can devote all your energy to truth+pleasure (1+3)
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Now back to my regularly scheduled procrastination and neglect of PM backlog of activities and pretending doing a thread on twitter crosses off the "make this spreadsheet" to-do on that to-do list which is itself sinking under a pile of entropy.
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Addendum: this approach should be called "designing for cowpaths" as in the UX heuristic of "pave the cowpaths." That only works if the original design was sensible enough as a potential field that the emergent cowpaths finish the job. Design the project to need no management.
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Cowpath-only paving like crash-only programming.
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61. "Project managing" network effects twitter.com/vgr/status/140
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