July 31, 2026
Volume 04 - Issue 30
This week I’m loving
This week’s love goes out to Dr. Timothy Tiryaki with really sound advice about how to understand what happens when an organization is experiencing siloing.
Most organizations talk about silos as if they are caused by poor culture, lack of collaboration, or “territorial” behavior.
But silos don’t appear because people suddenly stop caring.
…
Silos are the system’s default behavior when collaboration is underdesigned.
This framework reflects exactly what I have experienced in organizations struggling with silos and I hope it is useful to you.
Image credit: Dr Tim Tiryaki - LinkedIn
I’m excited to see the rest of the posts in this series and encourage you to follow along!
From the Practice
I’m volunteering as a mentor with the PMI this year and one topic that has been a frequent flyer at my sessions so far is project chartering. Specifically, the prevalence of overlooking this vital document in many organizations; the problems that happen for a project manager trying to lead a project without a charter; and the steps you can take to help your organization adopt project charters.
For several years now, I’ve flirted with the idea of teaching a course on this topic because real depth on how to charter projects well is, honestly, kind of lacking in project management education. The great discussions I’ve been having over the past couple of weeks, reignited this idea for me.
So I’m asking you, my cohort of project managers who can see the big picture:
An interesting read
Mike Fisher always has me at the edge of my seat when he writes about the laws of management and this week’s interesting read on Price’s Law is no exception.
For those of you who may not be up on your laws, Price’s Law states that 50% of the work is done by the square root of the number of people involved. For example if you have 16 people on a team, 4 of them did 50% of the work.
Your mission: read the article so that you fully understand the pitfalls of Price’s Law generalizations and then take up Mike’s challenge:
The best leaders I have watched are not the ones who stand guard over a tiny inner circle of the irreplaceable. They are the ones who keep widening the circle, who build systems that make more people capable of carrying load, who quietly measure themselves by how many names could hold the company up rather than how few.
A tip
Writing the new PMP exam?
Check out topic based question sets and the Full new practice exam available at PM Illustrated complete with Results Radar to help you identify areas that still need a tune-up.
Image credit: Mike Griffiths - PM Illustrated
A lesson
I know that one of the most common things project managers are using AI for is to support meeting summaries and follow-up. This week’s lesson is a cautionary tale from Erica Layer at AI on Purpose about the risks of this and how you can improve the output of prompts to extract critical meeting details from messy notes. The article features Erica’s exact prompts to create a strong feedback loop to avoid meeting follow-up hallucinations. If it hadn’t occurred to you that these might happen - I highly recommend the read!