Productive Paradoxes in Projects
Blog: Strategic Structures
In 2011, when I started this blog, I wanted it to be a place for reading and as such the initial theme was just a bit busier than this one. I didn’t go that far, but you still don’t see categories, tag clouds, my Twitter feed and so on. It was only recently that I added sharing buttons and started putting more images. And because of me keeping it minimal, you might have been reading this blog for some time without knowing about its tagline, as it is simply not visible in the blog. But it’s been there and when the blog appears in search results, you can see it.
The theme about paradoxes appeared only a few times, for example in From Distinction to Value and Back and previously in Language and Meta-Language for EA. I haven’t focused on it in a post so far. It was even more difficult to start talking about it to an audience of project managers. First, claiming that projects are produced and full of paradoxes might appear a bit radical. And second, project managers are solution-oriented people, while in paradoxes there is nothing to solve. There is a problem there, but its solution is a problem itself, the solution of which is the initial problem. And third, talking about paradoxes is one thing, but convincing that understanding them is useful is another. But I was lucky with my audience at the PMI Congress – very bright and open-minded people. Many of them recognised some of the phenomena I described in their own practice. I don’t know if the slides tell the story by themselves, but here they are:
You can download the slides from SlideShare but you can’t see the animations there and they can help in getting more of the story. To see the animations, play the presentation on YouTube:
In any case, this is just a start. There is a lot to explain, elaborate and further develop.
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