My monthly column at Techtarget: Project managers cannot rely on generalizations:

Photography by Notariety.

"The second reason was given to me by Nassim Taleb in his book The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. It is the human need to categorize everything. We just have to put the world around is in neat boxes. Taleb coins the term "Platonicity" for this phenomenon — "the focus on those pure, well-defined, and easily discernible objects like triangles, or more social notions like friendship or love, at the cost of ignoring those objects of seemingly messier and less tractable structures." We put a label on an event and use that knowledge to reason about the future. We use this mechanism on everything, including people."

To Bet Or Not To Bet: How The Brain Learns To Estimate Risk

"Planning entails making predictions. In an uncertain environment, however, our predictions often don't pan out. And erroneous prediction of risk often leads to unusual behaviour: euphoria or excessive gambling when risk is underestimated, and panic attacks or depression when we predict that things are riskier than they really are."

The Project Cartoon

Create your own version of this famous Project Management Cartoon.

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Below are the most popular posts on Project Shrink: The Blog (last 30 days - UPDATED 15th April 2008):

1. Introducing The Fish Pond
2. Management And Meditation
3. Proud Postings: Eric D Brown
4. Swimming Upstream The Information Flow
5. Fish And OODA Loops
6. What Is The Best Way To Motivate Team Members?
7. Project Management Code: Why Do You Do What You Do?
8. Stratification: Organizational Structures In A Pond
9. Proud Postings: Raven's Brain
10. Proud Postings: Undocumented Features
11. Social OODA Super Speedway
12. Driving On The OODA Highway
13. Filter And Drainage - Trust Running Through The Team
14. Bottoms Up: Leadership Style For A Better World
15. Way-New Collaboration: What I Meant To Say

Multicultural Project Management

"An effective project manager will work with culturally diverse team members to overcome all cultural, perceptual and language barriers. In todays global economy, multicultural project management is key to the success of many multinational corporations. This is particularly true for manufacturers that assemble components and parts from many countries around the world."
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My column at Techtarget for this month is up: Six Hats of Project Management.

Photography by TooFarNorth.

" As a project manager you get all kinds of problems to handle. Assessing the situation is, in my personal experience, the most difficult part. It is the old saying that knowing the problem is already half the solution. In this dynamic world full of changes no two situations are alike. To be able to handle project situations you need to have a flexible mind; you have to be able to switch your ways of looking at reality in order to get to the true problem.

Edward DeBono came up with his famous idea of Six Thinking Hats. Each hat has a color which stands for a certain state of mind. By changing hats (virtually, that is) you should use a different mindset when looking at a problem. Inspired by this techniques I came up with the following "Six Hats of Project Management."

Josh Nankivel of the PM Student made me aware of this great video: The Story Of Stuff. I recommend you check it out.

Photography by Kyknoord.

Wild Success in 2008 through Optimism and High Self-esteem

"Unrealistic optimism and high self-esteem are key factors in individual and team success. However the project management environment isnt exactly brimming with unbridled optimism and positive reinforcement. Quite the opposite. Many projects are highly challenging, some are carried out in unsupportive environments, and sometimes success is measured only by what percent of some impossible task was achieved."
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