July 10, 2026
Volume 04 - Issue 27
This week I’m loving
This week’s love goes out to AnnMarie Curley and I know we’ve featured a few of her pieces these past few weeks, but let’s just say, the nuggets keep coming!
The latest piece discusses a topic we all need to be paying more attention to: uncertainty.
Change used to arrive as an event. A system replacement, a reorganization, a merger. Hard, but bounded, with recovery time on either side. You could brace for the wave and steady yourself once it passed. That world is gone.
She calls out an organizational shortcoming many project managers are facing:
When change is that constant, the uncertainty stops being a phase you get through and becomes the condition you work in. Treating each change as a separate event you manage and recover from is a recipe for permanent exhaustion.
Read that again: change becomes the condition you work in.
This also means that the project management practices we are using, need to live with change, not adapt to it, or manage and document it.
The solution? Change-readiness on purpose.
How do you build this?
Importantly, it starts with leaders, yet many organizations are still starting with the change itself and getting everyone ready for it. This ignores an important reality:
…the leader… depleted and reactive cannot build steadiness in anyone else, because a team reads its leader's state long before it hears the leader's words.
Instead, you need to start with yourself. Lay a solid foundation that is steady when the going gets tough. A foundation that doesn’t react.
Then, focus on creating the conditions your team needs to do their best work.
…the safety that lets people try, get it wrong, and try again, and the clarity that keeps a team oriented when the path keeps shifting.
Why does this matter?
Managed as a series of one-off events, each change draws down the same reservoir of human energy, and the reservoir runs lower every time. Built deliberately, the capabilities turn each change into a repetition that strengthens the capacity rather than spending it.
Human energy is what powers great ideas and successful businesses. When you deplete this, your business is surviving, not thriving.
The payoff is not soft. Deloitte found that organizations building adaptive, human-centered approaches are 2.4 times more likely to report better financial results.
Organizational agility has a similar effect at 1.5x performance compared to peers according to McKinsey.
The end goal?
…an organization carry change well, because the people leading it and the people living it can move through it together rather than bracing against it.
I know, I’m not going to think about change the same way ever again!
From the Practice
This week’s “From the Practice” segment comes from Greta Blash and is focused on a topic that lately may be the bane of your existence: data.
Specifically, how to do a better job collecting data requirements during a project.
Let me know if this sounds familiar:
The symptoms often show up as:
Conflicting interpretations of results
Limited confidence in project outcomes
Additional requests for information after delivery
Decisions based on assumptions instead of evidence
These challenges can appear to be separate issues, but they often point back to one root problem: data requirements were not fully understood early in the process.
If it sounds familiar, don’t miss this read! It’s full of golden tips for how to solve the problem!
An interesting read
This week’s interesting read is an article featured in PM World Journal that uses a somewhat complex use case of regional conflict to locate two dysfunctional patterns that every PM should recognize:
“the authority-competence gap” - a gap between formal authority an operational competence
and “the dual-track authority problem”, competition between informal and formal authority in an organization.
Nevertheless the read is interesting to bolster the mechanisms by which these dysfunctions arise and the potential strategies available to manage them.
Highly recommend!
A tip
If, like me, you are interested in the intersection of strategy and execution in your organization, Joe Pusz with the PMO Leader is looking for your feedback on the 2026 State of Strategy Execution research survey. Take 10 minutes out of your day and share your honest thoughts to help shape the report that will be released in October.
A lesson
This week’s lesson is a timely World Cup themed lesson in project governance from the great Joe Pusz. No further notes from me.