Here's a useful paradigm both for the traditionalist and the agilist from a corner of the PM space not normally the place for such: CriticalUncertainties, a typically conservative blog about critical safety and failure (or fail safe) requirements in complex systems.
But, nonetheless, we get this input from critical systems safety expert Mathew Squair:
When you don’t know what to do, don’t sit down and plan what you don’t know, get people moving, talking, collaborating and making stuff. Then out of that activity you’ll find the information will emerge that will allow you to make decisions.As Tom Peters points out we need to understand whether our methodologies have an inherent bias for action or a bias for planning, and then whether the situation is complex (but understood and stable) where planning will pay off or uncertain (with high novelty and volatility) where talking, thinking and looking at the small grain issues to build a picture of where we are is what we ought to be doing.
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