Creative Project Management

7Project: Intelligence

In solving a problem of this sort, the grand thing is to be able to reason backward. That is a very useful accomplishment, and a very easy one, but people do not practice it much. In the everyday affairs of life it is more useful to reason forward, and so the other comes to be neglected. There are fifty who can reason synthetically for one who can reason analytically.—Sherlock Holmes, in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s “A Study in Scarlet,” 1887

THE ENVIRONMENT IN which your project operates can be almost infinitely complex. Much of it is hidden, and even more of it is beyond your control. That predicament gives rise to an all-too-common tendency to prefer the certain over the uncertain, the controllable over the uncontrollable. ...