There is an understandable desire from project leadership, sponsors, and customers for predictable performance in our projects. Such determinism enables other business actions and decisions to be reliably coordinated based upon these outcomes.

Most of us are invested in the faith that such predictability will be achieved by following plans we create for these endeavors. But in the real world, achieving such outcomes is nearly always more complex than we originally anticipate when we craft these plans.

In the new book, A Checklist Manifesto, the author Atul Gawande describes how difficult navigating this complexity can be:

Two professors who study the science of  complexity—Brenda Zimmerman of York University and  Sholom Glouberman of the University of Toronto—have proposed a distinction among three different kinds of problems in the world: the simple, the complicated, and the complex. Simple problems, they note, are ones like baking a cake from a mix. There is a recipe. Sometimes there are a few basic techniques to learn. But once these are mastered, following the recipe brings a high likelihood of success.