Imposter tips: multi-dimensional thinking — part 1 (why?)

I’ve been in many trainings about project management, and every time they start with presenting the modern-world challenge of working in a complex environment with lots of unknowns. Yet something is missing for me.

Eventually, for every methodology, it all comes down to the methods used to navigate this complexity and getting the maximum out of it, and I’ll try to share some of my thoughts on this in a few coming short posts.

In my head, I call my own approach multi-dimensional vision or thinking.

Let’s start with the basics.

The priorities concept is there to tell us that not all tasks and not all factors are equal, and some are more important than others. And the moment we realize that, there are different ways to approach it: focus on the most valuable aspects of the project (= prioritizing them) or accept the complicated multi-vector reality and deal with the whole picture.

Now, focusing solely on the most important aspects can be very efficient (and this is what most approaches do), but I’d like to warn you about it. I personally believe this narrows down our perception, and instead of being focused we begin ignoring information.

What could be so important about not-the-most-important factors?

• if there’s too many small factors, it could be a big factor by itself (for example, I had a post about small risks a while ago)
• our priorities capture a static picture, while things change, and a small thing today can become a big thing in 2 weeks and sneak up on us if we stop considering it
• different people / parts of organization have different priorities, and each one tends to focus on their #1–2 factors, often ignoring priorities of others. This can cause a clash in a time of crisis

So, eventually, focusing on the most important factors can lead us to accumulating risks, losing perspective over time & conflicting over priorities. And that’s why I try to keep the smaller factors in mind as well.

Now, obviously, we cannot monitor absolutely everything, but the usual approach is limiting the factors we focus on, while I’d like to encourage the opposite: expanding focus as much as possible.

Next time I’d like to talk about some ideas of “how”: how we can keep track of multiple factors without losing direction.