Are we managing projects or managing uncertainty?

The most successful projects may no longer be those that eliminate uncertainty, but those that learn to thrive within it.

For much of its history, project management has been built around a reassuring idea: define the scope, create the plan, manage the risks, control the change and deliver the outcome.

I still believe in planning. The old saying is still true: when you fail to plan, you plan to fail.

But after more than a decade working across technology, education and transformation projects, I have learned something uncomfortable: the plan is often the easiest part. Reality is where project management truly begins, in an environment where requirements change, technology moves, stakeholders interpret information differently, and every mitigation can introduce new uncertainties of its own.

As I joked during a recent APM panel, sometimes your mitigation strategy needs another mitigation strategy.

This is why I increasingly wonder whether our profession is really about managing projects at all. Perhaps our deeper role is managing uncertainty.

The research has been pointing us here for some time. Pich, Loch and De Meyer show in their research that situations where information is sufficiently known can be managed through conventional planning, while greater uncertainty may require learning, experimentation and adaptation.

Perminova, Gustafsson and Wikström similarly argue in their research that managing uncertainty depends on reflection, sensemaking and the ability to respond as understanding develops.

That is different from risk management. Risk deals largely with events we can identify and assess.

Uncertainty also includes what we do not yet understand, what changes while we are delivering and, sometimes, what we do not know that we do not know.

Crossrail offers a useful public example

Its Learning Legacy on systems integration notes that the programme’s scale, long timescale and evolving technologies made it extremely difficult to predict all integration activities at the outset.

Requirements and responsibilities had to develop as the design matured.

The lesson was not that planning had failed. It was that effective delivery required structures that could progressively identify interfaces, surface ambiguity and adapt using the best information available at each stage.

That matters because uncertainty is not disappearing. It is increasing.

APM’s Project Management Skills Survey 2026 reflects that shift.

Communication and stakeholder engagement were among the skills most commonly identified as important, while leadership also ranked highly. The survey also found that 88% of respondents expect AI skills to be important over the next five years.

APM’s wider research on the future of the profession similarly points to rising complexity driven by digital transformation, sustainability and stakeholder expectations, with greater emphasis required on leadership and continuous learning.

This connects strongly with something I said during a recent: future-focused leadership is not about predicting the future. It is about building people and organisations capable of responding to whatever future arrives.

AI makes that even more important

In a recent FuturePM newsletter, I asked: “AI can do the task, but can it read the room?” AI can analyse data, draft schedules, identify patterns and simulate scenarios. But someone still has to interpret competing priorities, recognise resistance, challenge an assumption, navigate an ethical trade-off or decide when the evidence has changed enough to change direction.

AI is available but human judgement is still the premium.

Bent Flyvbjerg’s research on megaprojects offers another warning against overconfidence in prediction, showing how large projects repeatedly suffer from underestimated risk, cost and schedule challenges. The lesson is not that planning is useless. It is that plans should not be mistaken for certainty.

RAID logs, dashboards and controls create visibility. They do not create certainty.

Perhaps governance therefore needs to ask more than: “Are we on plan?” Instead, it should also ask: “What have we learned, what has changed and what do we now need to do differently?”

The future project professional may need to become less obsessed with certainty and more skilled at creating clarity.

Because while uncertainty may be unavoidable, confusion is not.