# The Broken Modern Management Paradigm By:: [[Brian Heath]] 2023-11-05 What is the right way to manage people and projects? This may be the wrong question. A better question is, what does one believe is the correct way to manage people and projects? Many believe it's via a process that tracks and reports activities. This is the world of Project Management, Gantt Charts, and Kanban boards. It is also the world of setting goals years in advance and having daily standup meetings. This view is so standard that most people do not consider alternatives. Yet, how often have these tools and systems failed to deliver on their promises of efficiency and on-time performance? At a minimum, they fail as much as they succeed. Humans are just experts in confirmation and activity bias. We seek what we already believe, and almost everyone thinks these tools and systems are the way to manage people and projects. As one explores this issue more deeply, one will be amazed at how frequently the modern management paradigm is ineffective at managing by its definitions of goodness. This is not due to a failure to execute but a failure to understand the nature of humanity, systems, and the universe. Humans are individually and socially complex, with an innate desire to make sense of it all. Systems in their entirety are beyond our comprehension, so we reduce them down to models that are all wrong and sometimes useful. The universe is predictably random until it isn't, and then all bets are off. All of these conspire to make the modern management paradigm only occasionally useful when humans are robots, systems are rigged for the short-term and powerful, and the universe decides to behave like yesterday. As the saying goes, even a broken clock is right twice daily. But the clock is still broken, and so is the modern management paradigm. #### Related Items [[Management]] [[Paradigms]] [[Systems Thinking]] [[The Human Condition]] [[Project Management]] [[Thinking]] [[Beliefs]]