Lessons From the Field

How Projects Succeed

Ten years into my project management career, I understood what made projects succeed or fail. I had my PMP certification and knew the PMBOK Guide inside and out. I measured success through schedule, quality, and budget.

Then, I learned Scrum. What drew me initially to agile frameworks wasn’t a technical superiority but their recognition of something I’d repeatedly observed in my own projects: the most successful outcomes emerged not from perfect planning but from teams that could adapt quickly to new information. The projects that thrived were those where information flowed freely across boundaries, team members felt safe to surface problems early, and learning happened continuously rather than only at the end.

The Implicit Curriculum of Traditional Project Management

Traditional project management education focuses heavily on instruments, methods, and control mechanisms. We learn to create detailed work breakdown structures, manage critical paths, create artifacts and other documents, and track variances against baseline plans. These skills represent the “explicit curriculum” of project management.

The implicit curriculum — what many students learn about project management — is that PMs can control project success through means and methods.

Projects succeed through information flow, relationship building, and social conditions where teams can navigate uncertainty together.

Consider the typical project failure. How often does the root cause trace back to inadequate planning versus inadequate information sharing? In my experience, projects fail far more often because:

• Critical information didn’t reach decision-makers in time
• Team members hesitated to surface problems due to psychosocial safety concerns
• Stakeholders operated on different assumptions that were never explicitly discussed
• Knowledge gaps emerged between specialist domains that couldn’t be bridged quickly enough

These are fundamentally social problems, not planning problems.

Scrum as a Genre for Information Flow

When I began an academic study of rhetoric and discourse, I learned to define a rhetorical genre as practices or conventions of discourse that a community establishes as ways of acting together. This lens transformed how I understood Scrum and other project management frameworks. These frameworks fail when we view them narrowly as processes. Frameworks are genres — recurrent patterns of social action that shape how teams communicate, collaborate, and make meaning together.

In my graduate research on Scrum as a genre, I wrote that the recurrent Scrum ceremonies are social situations that create “environments for learning” and “locations within which meaning is constructed.” The daily standups, sprint reviews, and retrospectives give us space to build shared understanding and enable rapid adaptation to changing conditions.

This insight helped me understand why implementing Scrum practices as formulaic processes will fail to deliver promised results. Organizations that adopt Scrum ceremonies and artifacts as tasks to complete will miss the deeper purpose: creating conditions where knowledge emerges through conversation and teams can coordinate dynamically rather than through rigid, predefined plans.

The Social Construction of Project Success

Drawing from Anderson’s work on organization development, I’ve come to see projects as dialogic systems where “individual, group, and organizational actions result from socially constructed realities created and sustained by prevailing narratives, stories, and conversations.” This perspective fundamentally changes how we approach project leadership.

Instead of focusing predominantly on technical project management skills, effective project leaders cultivate their ability to:

Foster generative dialogue — Create conversations where new possibilities emerge rather than simply status updates or problem-solving sessions

Build a psychosocial safety climate — Ensure that team members feel safe to share concerns, admit knowledge gaps, and challenge assumptions without fear of negative consequences

Bridge specialist domains — Help different functional experts understand each other’s perspectives and constraints

Navigate adaptive challenges — Recognize when projects face problems that require more than technical solutions and instead demand changes in mindsets, relationships, or approaches

Five Practices That Transform Project Outcomes

Based on my experience integrating dialogic approaches with traditional project management, here are five practices that consistently improve project performance:

1. Start with Assumptions, Not Requirements

Traditional projects begin with requirements gathering, assuming we can define what needs to be built upfront. Dialogic projects start by surfacing and examining the assumptions underlying those requirements.

Practical Application: Begin each project with an “assumption mapping” session where team members and stakeholders explicitly discuss what they’re assuming about user needs, technical constraints, market conditions, and organizational capabilities. Revisit these assumptions regularly as the project progresses.

2. Design for Learning, Not Just Delivery

Traditional projects optimize for predictable delivery against predetermined specifications. Dialogic projects optimize for learning velocity — how quickly the team can discover new information and adapt their approach accordingly.

Practical Application: Structure projects as a series of learning experiments rather than a linear sequence of deliverables. Each sprint or phase should be designed to test critical assumptions and surface new knowledge that informs subsequent work.

3. Create Cross-Boundary Conversations

Traditional projects manage interfaces between different specialist domains through formal documentation and handoffs. Dialogic projects create ongoing conversations that allow specialists to coordinate dynamically.

Practical Application: Implement regular “perspective-taking” sessions where team members literally represent different stakeholder viewpoints. Include cross-functional pairing or shadowing opportunities that build empathy and understanding across specialist boundaries.

4. Make Problems Visible Early

Traditional projects often hide problems until they become crises, fearing that surfacing issues will be seen as failure. Dialogic projects foster psychosocial safety climates for early problem identification.

Practical Application: Establish “weak signal” sharing practices where team members can surface concerns before they become problems. Celebrate early problem identification rather than penalizing it. Create forums specifically for discussing uncertainties and emerging challenges.

5. Focus on Capability Building, Not Just Task Completion

Traditional projects optimize for completing predetermined tasks efficiently. Dialogic projects balance task completion with building the team’s capability to handle increasingly complex challenges.

Practical Application: Include explicit reflection time in project cycles to discuss what the team learned about working together effectively, not just what was accomplished. Invest in developing team members’ skills in dialogue, systems thinking, and adaptive problem-solving.

Beyond Agile: Principles for Any Project Context

While my journey began with Scrum, these insights apply to any project context. Whether you’re managing construction projects, organizational change initiatives, or product development efforts, the principles remain consistent:

• Information flow matters more than perfect planning
• Psychosocial safety enables rapid adaptation
• Cross-functional understanding prevents late-stage surprises
• Learning capacity and knowledge growth determine long-term success

The specific practices may vary depending on your industry, organizational culture, and project constraints, but the underlying focus on creating conditions for effective knowledge sharing remains crucial.

The Evolution Continues

As I’ve moved beyond traditional project management toward broader questions of organizational effectiveness and shared knowledge, I’ve realized that project management was always really about something larger: creating conditions where groups of people can coordinate effectively to achieve shared goals in the face of uncertainty.

This realization has profound implications for how we develop project leaders. Instead of focusing primarily on technical skills — important as they are — we need to develop capabilities in:

• Facilitating meaningful dialogue across diverse perspectives
• Creating psychosocial safety climates in high-pressure environments
• Recognizing and addressing social challenges
• Building learning-oriented rather than just delivery-oriented cultures

Moving Forward: One Conversation at a Time

Transforming how you approach project management doesn’t require abandoning everything you know or implementing wholesale organizational change. It starts with paying attention to the conversations happening — or not happening — within your projects.

In your next project interaction, try asking:

• “What assumptions are we making that we haven’t explicitly discussed?”
• “What information do we need that we don’t currently have access to?”
• “What would make it easier for us to surface problems early?”

These simple questions can begin to shift your projects from information-hoarding to knowledge-sharing systems, creating conditions where teams can adapt quickly and deliver outcomes that truly meet stakeholder needs.

The future of project management isn’t about better tools or more rigorous methodologies. It’s about creating human systems where knowledge emerges through conversation, problems surface early enough to address, and teams develop the capability to navigate complexity together.

What conversation could your current project team have tomorrow that would unlock new possibilities for success?