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HomeShop at BookSurgeBusiness & EconomicsManagementComplex Project Management: Seminal Essays by Dr David H Dombkins |
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At Last! Oct 21, 2007
By Michael D. Mc Dermott
"Mike McDermott"
At long last! Much of the theoretical framework for facilitating human development has been around for decades now, but practice has been carried along by its own inertia and "Hey! That's my meal ticket you are stepping on!" As someone who has spent many years working in the developing world, I can testify that the development industry has not being delivering at anywhere near the efficiencies required to meet the challenges ahead, and that this would be the case even without the new challenges of climate change and energy crises, and other emergent ones such as HIV/AIDS. As with the generals ruling the trenches in World War I and to even more devastating effect, steady-as-she-goes prevails: development project managers have been major contributors to this problem.
Now, a challenger to the comfort zones of project managers has arrived with a message of hope for the rest of us: that some project managers are capable of a phase transition taking them beyond the reductionist, clunk and grind approaches they have been taught by their generals, and are gaining competencies to genuinely address the messy, non-linear reality that we find ourselves immersed within. A retreat to certainty is a retreat from development, but Dombkins not only embraces uncertainty, but shows us how we can dance with it - not only in our professional lives, but in our personal ones a well.
With his emphases upon partnering as a cultural change process, on double-loop learning as a personal change, and other aspects of wave planning as an environment change process, Dombkins has pointed the way for his discipline to evolve up the developmental hierarchy traced, for example, by Bill Torbert in management theory (Torbert's "action inquiry" process has similarities with Dombkins' "double loop learning") and Michael Commons in cognitive development (Dombkins' work can be seen as a means for project managers to develop from Commons' levels 8, 9, &10 - concrete, abstract and formal thinking - up to levels 11, 12, 13 and beyond - systematic, metasystematic, and paradigmatic).
Concrete thinkers consider themselves to be practical. They aren't really: they are simply rather primitive thinkers. As Benjamin Disraeli put it, "the 'practical' man is one who tends to repeat the blunders of his ancestors". The truly practical are the seers, those whose vision embraces more reality, and with that embrace, evolve the capacity to address new and non-linear challenges as they arise. I see Dombkins as one such, and this book as a product of a highly developed cognitive complexity in his own field, and with truly practical potential applications over a far wider field. It remains to be seen whether or not Dombkins and others like him can overcome the pervasive and pernicious resistance to change which still afflicts so much of humanity, but where there's life there's hope, and there's hope for us all in this book.
A basis for global discussion and change Oct 12, 2007
By Stephen Hayes
David Dombkins is clearly one of the world's leading thinkers regarding the issues surrounding project and program management complexity. His work provides the basis for the global community to begin the discussion on how we can more successfully deliver our most complex programs and cope with complexity in increasingly uncertain and complex world. Well worth a read and a good one for any high end program/change manager's reference library.
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