As newly hired project manager here at Socialsquare, I thought I would let my first blog post on this site be about project management methods. The concepts of agile and scrum are flying through the office air and it made me think about an article I used for my master thesis last year. It tells a great story on how to convey a fine and useful frame for successful change projects. It is the story of Lewis and Clark, the two intrepid explorers who made the first journey to the American West in 1804-1806. Their expedition – heading out towards something quite unknown – can be seen as three smaller iterations – the three journeys:

Initially, just after the American president Thomas Jefferson had defined their task, the two explorers pored over maps and journals in order to get an idea of how the journey might unfold, what resources would be required, what success might look and feel like. Basically they tried to describe what their goal was. That was their first journey.

Once they had described their goal, the second journey started. Here they selected the expedition members and engaged them in their vision in order to get their buy-in on the idea. Collectively they fleshed out a plan and plotted their desired route, based on their idea of the landscape they would meet. Since they were going into ‘the unknown’ everybody was aware that they only had partial information available to plan their journey.

The third journey starts as they embarked on the actual trip. They faced unexpected obstacles, and had to adapt to the conditions around them. For Lewis and Clarke, the scale of the Rocky Mountains came as quite a surprise. But they remained resilient and eventually discovered a path that led them to the Columbia River. Though the way was different from what they’d expected and the endpoint was not the all-water passage to the west coast they had planned to find, they were very happy with what they discovered.

The two first journeys not only helped them plan and prepare for the expedition – it also helped them refocus, regroup and reorient when their final journey proved difficult and the obstacles seemed insurmountable.

It is easy to translate these three journeys into a business context, thereby providing a great frame for understanding the complexity inherent within change projects and the need for agile and adaptive project management. In this sense one could also add a fourth journey following the first three, where the gains have to be implemented and integrated in the business (in Socialsquare-houseterms: Anchoring).

The point is that things that are complex only make sense in hindsight. And most projects involving people are complex, so instead of trying to boil the ocean, navigating in these circumstances is a matter of identifying what really matters and then focus, knowing that things are likely to change and that you will encounter unexpected difficulties and opportunities along the way.

By recognising this, we can help companies foster the successful projects by being prepared to adapt as needed when we encounter the unexpected – and not when it’s too late. To me that is what agile is about: rather safe fail than failsafe.