When I started this blog in 2011, I wanted it to be a place for undistracted reading. The initial theme was not much busier than this one. I didn’t go that far, but you still don’t see categories, tag clouds, and my Twitter feed. Only recently have I added sharing buttons and started putting more images, and because I am keeping it minimal, you might have been reading this blog for some time without knowing about its tagline, as it is simply not visible in the blog. But it’s been there, and when the blog appears in search results, you can see it.
The theme of paradoxes appeared only a few times, for example, in From Distinction to Value and Back and previously in Language and Meta-Language for EA. I haven’t focused on it in a post so far. It was even more difficult to start talking about it to an audience of project managers. First, claiming that projects are produced and full of paradoxes might appear a bit radical. Second, project managers are solution-oriented people, while in paradoxes, there is nothing to solve. There is a problem there, but its solution is a problem itself, the solution of which is the initial problem. Third, talking about paradoxes is one thing, but convincing others that understanding them is useful is another. But I was lucky to have a very bright and open-minded audience at the PMI Congress. Many of them recognized some of the phenomena I described in their own practice. I don’t know if the slides tell the story by themselves, but here they are:
You can download the slides from SlideShare but you can’t see the animations there and they can help in getting more of the story (the talk wasn’t recorded). To see the animations, play the presentation on YouTube:
In any case, this is just a start. There is a lot to explain, elaborate and further develop.