27. Your Only Function

IF YOU ARE A PROJECT MANAGER, an area manager, a team manager, or whatever kind of manager, you have one primary function.

Your meetings, documents, plans, definitions, and negotiations all serve one purpose: Reducing uncertainty.

You might not know what will happen in the future, but you should know how to find out what will happen or prepare your teams for the unexpected.

Contrary to the belief that we must adapt to living in scenarios of uncertainty, successful projects are those that focus on iteration and conducting experiments to confirm or refute hypotheses. Similarly, science is not about managing knowledge, but about managing ignorance (the acceptance that we don’t know something and establishing a path to discover and verify it). This involves acknowledging what we don’t know and setting a course to find and validate it. In a similar way, project, team, and area management involves guiding people on a path to reduce the unknown, building upon what is known to progress with certainty.

Management is about anticipating future scenarios and acting accordingly.

It’s about ensuring that you and your team are prepared.

The next time you are faced with hundreds of files, Gantt charts, plans, meetings, minutes, numbers, budgets, and requests, identify which elements provide certainty and which do not. Keep the former to build certainty around you. You can’t leave your people hanging on a “cliffhanger.”

Uncertainty is corrosive. Reduce it.