How much resilience do you need?

There’s an old joke about two wildlife cameramen filming a lion. When the lion spots them and takes an interest, one of them tugs off his desert boots and grabs his trainers instead. 

‘What are you doing?’ the other says. ‘You’ll never outrun a lion, even in those.’

‘I don’t need to outrun the lion,’ says his savvier companion, lacing up his Nikes. ‘I just need to outrun you.’

In our world, the idea of project management as a core capability has become corporate orthodoxy, with many organizations embracing full-on transformation.

The desire to ‘be the best’ at doing projects is a nice idea. But it leads to overkill. On complex projects, few people truly understand the scale of the challenge they face. So how do they know when they’ve built enough capability to meet it?

Developing all-out resilience through a central corporate body is expensive. And comes with no guarantee of improving your project success rate. So is it really a competitive advantage?

Whatever happened to ‘good enough’? And why pay to develop and maintain something you may never need to deploy? Focus, instead, on the challenge in front of you.

We encourage our clients to choose project readiness over corporate robustness.

We encourage our clients to choose project readiness over corporate robustness.

What do you think?