The other thing that has really struct me is the world of project management and the lived reality. It feels like a lot of people want to do project management, without actually doing the hard work. Lines are drawn, positions set, but when the game starts and chaos ensues, they are lost at sea. I have been left wondering if project management really exists and if so, what does it look like? I hear the successes and achievements, this pie chart and that bar graph, but the reality feels like something different. I am therefore intrigued by your discussion of system inquiry. It reminded me of Dave Cormier’s discussion of ‘complex’ versus ‘complicated’:
We are confronted by the complicated/complex division everyday in education. Do I want to know if a medical students has remembered the nine steps of a process of inquiry to work with a patient or do I want to know if they built a good raport? How often do we choose the thing that is easier to measure… simply because we can verify that our grading is ‘fair’. How often do we get caught in conversations around how ‘rigourous’ an assessment is when what we really mean is ‘how easy is it to defend to a parent who’s going to complain about a child’s grade’.
Source: Making Change in Education II – Complexity vs. Lean Six Sigma (learning isn’t like money)
Might be something I need to dive into further.