The hardest problems to solve are those that have never been solved before. If a problem has already been solved, you have a model to follow and improve on. The risks are predictable, and to some degree, controllable. The costs and benefits which lie ahead can be estimated and managed. Experience can be leveraged. When you are dealing with unprecedented problems, you do not have such breadcrumbs. You find yourself pathfinding through unfamiliar terrain, often with a poor understanding of where you are and where you're going. How can you estimate how long something will take or will cost when it's never been done before? How can you schedule innovation? Given such 'unprecedented' challenges, there are a number of realities and challenges that have to be dealt with. While many of these are also issues for precedented projects, their impact is often compounded on unprecedented projects to create a 'perfect storm' of risks that can overwhelm the unprepared. In simple terms, the questions which must be dealt with include:

• How to gather insights about your (poorly defined) mission, and utilize that understanding to establish actionable goals and plans

A popular rule of thumb in project management is that if you don't know where you're going, any path you chose to attain it will suffice.

• How to focus on, navigate towards, and track progress with respect to goals

If you know where you're going, but don't know how to get there, you are lost. If you know how to get there, but can't apply that knowledge, you might as well be lost.

• Where and when to allocate (and re-allocate) resources among competing priorities

We all have the same amount of time available to us each day - 24 hours. Team members need to learn how collectively invest that time to realize the best returns possible.

• How to attract, motivate, and assimilate the discretionary efforts of your team

Top performers outperform average performers by far more than you might expect. Some of these differences are due to raw talent, and others are due to the level of effort that people commit to for their assigned tasks. Effective use of the best available talent is always a goal for team leaders, but is particularly important when you are tackling things that haven't been done before, and are trying to do that quickly.

• How to share information and exploit learning among team members in a timely fashion

The more people there are on a team, the more challenging communications becomes, since the number of interconnections increases exponentially with the size of the team. Communications is key to learning, and learning is key to only having to experience painful lessons once.

• How to rapidly explore and make decisions among possible alternatives on commitments, approaches, and priorities

The less clear an outcome or path to an outcome is, the more likely there will be extensive debate on the issue. Debate is healthy, but must be constructive, timely, and discerning. The more likely debates are to challenge the 'status quo', the more important it becomes to have a clear action plan for how to manage this process.

• How to achieve 'critical mass' quickly

The sooner you can operate synergistically within your environment, and reduce your dependence on the injection of special provisions for resources, information, or protection, the more likely it is that you will survive over the long run. For development projects, this means realizing the break-even point in project payoff earlier. For political campaigns, it means winning the hearts and minds of the people. In any context, it means reaching a point in which any change 'feeds' on itself, and followers adopt a natural desire to emulate the leaders who are driving that change.

The traditional systems engineering and project management approaches to the above issues typically involve introducing structure, discipline, and decision-making into the project setting. Aspects of each of these must also be introduced into an unprecedented project; however, the goals often have to be recast and applied to the problems of building communities, acquiring knowledge, and rapidly pruning alternatives, rather than jumping to detailed long-range planning when neither the terrain nor the modes of transport may yet be clear.