For decades, the profession of project management (and most project managers) have attempted to sell us all a comforting myth. The myth is that projects are, by default, certain. That with enough upfront planning, the right tools and techniques, and sufficient discipline, uncertainty can be reduced to the point where delivery becomes largely predictable. This idea is deeply embedded in how project management is taught, practiced, and explained to non practitioners. But it is wrong – very wrong.
Uncertainty is not a deviation from normal project conditions. It is the normal condition for all projects. The only thing that varies from project to project is the degree and type of uncertainty involved.
Traditional project management positions certainty as the goal. Plans, schedules, budgets, and risk registers are framed as mechanisms for increasing control and predictability. When change occurs, the narrative is that the project is being re planned in order to restore certainty. This framing reassures stakeholders, but it totally misrepresents reality.
Planning and replanning is not evidence that certainty is being maintained. It is evidence that uncertainty is doing exactly what it always does. New information emerges, assumptions are invalidated, constraints shift and additional creative ideas emerge and evolve. The key element underlying all of this is that human behaviour changes. All of your plans do not converge on certainty. Your plans are exposed as a provisional understanding of a future that cannot be fully known, but you still keep telling people there is certainty. Unless you are a magical being that can control the future, or foresee the future, you know the truth is that the normal state for projects is uncertainty.
This distinction matters, particularly for lay people. Sponsors, funders, artists, executives, and clients are often led to believe that once a plan exists, the future is broadly understood. When things change, they interpret it as failure, poor management, or lack of competence. Trust erodes not because uncertainty exists, but because it was never honestly acknowledged in the first place.
The most damaging misconception is the belief that project managers bring certainty to projects. We do not and we never have. What good project managers actually bring is awareness of uncertainty, structure around it, and mechanisms for responding to it. We help teams surface assumptions, test ideas, learn quickly, and make informed trade offs as reality unfolds. If there was just one thing I could get project managers to do it would be to be honest about uncertainty in their projects.
When we pretend otherwise, we create perverse incentives. Uncertainty gets hidden rather than discussed. Estimates get treated as commitments (which they never are – see my earlier comment about being a magical being) rather than informed guesses. Replanning becomes something to explain away instead of something to be expected. The result is disappointment, frustration, and a quiet sense that projects are always somehow falling short of an imaginary standard.
This is especially true in creative and innovative work, where ambiguity is not a flaw in the process but the raw material of value creation. Trying to impose a certainty based worldview onto creative projects does not make them more successful. It makes them more brittle. So, we need to change the story we tell about projects.
Planning should be framed as an ongoing learning activity, not a prediction exercise. Estimates should be explicitly described as provisional and probabilistic with expectations fully set. Governance should reward early disclosure of uncertainty, not punish variance from an initial plan. Replanning should be understood as responsible adaptation, not a loss of control.
Most importantly, we need to stop positioning certainty as the defining outcome of good project management. The profession becomes more credible, not less, when it is honest about uncertainty. Stakeholders are generally capable of understanding that complex work cannot be predicted with precision. What they struggle with is being sold certainty and then experiencing reality. Uncertainty is not the enemy of projects. Denying it is.
If project management is to remain relevant, particularly in creative and knowledge driven industries, we need to shift our worldview. From certainty seeking to uncertainty literate. From control to sense making. From pretending we know the future to being prepared for whatever future arrives. That is not a weakness of the profession. It is its real value.
