What project managers can learn from Tom Cruise

One of the beauties of project management is that, over time, seasoned professionals start to see patterns and rhythms occurring in projects that, on the face of it, don’t resemble one another. Of course, a lot of that is to do with professional training and rigorous methodologies. But even in the softer areas – people, comms, stakeholder engagement – project interactions become familiar. Tropes emerge. That’s stuff learned through doing. You can’t train people on it.

Maybe not people – but machines?

Take the Mission: Impossible franchise. It’s hard to think of a series of movies more aligned with the project management profession. Literally every plot involves a complex task with a clear goal. The business‑as‑usual folks are not able to manage a situation – and the project team designs a plan to fix things using its unique methodology, then moves on when the goal is achieved.

The latest instalment, The Final Reckoning, is about a rogue artificial intelligence (AI), ‘the Entity’, that’s gained sentience and, for some reason, wants to take over the world. It starts by deceiving the crew of a submarine into destroying their own boat. That felt quite on‑the‑nose, given the emergence of large language models (LLMs) and the way we’re using them to create a disinformation space that threatens to wreck society.

So, obviously, we asked ChatGPT to come up with a project plan for a Mission: Impossible movie. The implications for both project management and scriptwriting are fascinating. (You can write a prompt yourself – so we won’t reproduce everything here). It’s pretty much spot on – both for the project and the movies. You might argue that that’s because the films are all essentially the same, just with different stunts and plot twists. Yet we can’t help feeling that it also reveals where humans – whether in projects or action‑thriller screenwriting – will retain a role.

If you choose to accept IT…

ChatGPT generates a decent project overview. The locations are plausibly international. And the project name it picks, Operation Shadow Eclipse, is perfect Hollywood: ominous sounding, but technically nonsensical. How do you eclipse a shadow?

It lists key stakeholders. Again, this is easy enough: the faces might change between projects, but the key functions remain constant. In the films, the Director of the Impossible Mission Force (IMF) always turns out to be, at best, a bumbling idiot sticking to the party line; at worst, a deeply amoral agent working for the other side. That’s surely familiar to any project manager working for a hard‑driving CEO with a political agenda.

Any project needs field ops, tech specialists, logistics and local assets. Again, you can’t fault ChatGPT: from a top‑level planning perspective, it’s got Mission: Impossible down pat. But it’s in the key stage descriptions where its project plan really starts to shine.

Stage 1: mission planning and intel gathering

We’re pretty sure that the Secretary (the one who disavows any knowledge of Ethan Hunt or his team if they’re caught or killed) would approve of the stage gate here: ‘IMF Director approval’. The plan calls for the project to identify threat actors; gather intelligence; secure blueprints, protocols and travel plans; assemble the team; and assign roles based on operational needs.

That’s a pretty tight kick‑off agenda for any project, and by setting the stage gate as sponsor approval, the AI is showing a deftness with process and office politics.

Score: 9/10

Stage 2: infiltration and reconnaissance

ChatGPT knows that a key part of any mission is the recon montage. You should try this at your next project briefing. As you’re walking the team through their tasks, imagine a series of shots of them subtly tapping the camera built into their glasses, or brushing some impossibly sophisticated data reader past the briefcase of a bean‑counter from finance.

This one’s all about surveillance and data – it’s always useful to know the project landscape well. In Mission: Impossible, as ChatGPT explains, you must have latex masks and fake credentials to get your intel. And the project team must identify human or infrastructure flaws in the target location. Stage gate? ‘Confirmation of viable infiltration routes’. The less viable, the better, dramatically speaking.

Score: 8/10

Stage 3: execution of the primary mission

When the action starts for real, good project leaders prize adaptability and accountability. In Mission: Impossible, of course, it’s all about suspense here, defeating the security procedures despite everything that was planned in stage two going a bit wrong.

ChatGPT describes the stage gate here as ‘successful acquisition or neutralisation of the target’, but of course that’s crazy. It absolutely must go sideways, or at the very least reveal to the project team that their original mission was a ruse of some kind. The AI does deliver a risk register with mitigations. But while that should worry project planners hoping it would be over‑optimistic, the Hollywood scriptwriters know to be more creative – if it goes according to plan, it’s dull.

Score: 5/10

Stages 4 and 5: extraction and damage control

Exfiltration is never easy, but ChatGPT gamely posits ‘Confirmation of successful team extraction’ as stage gate four. And as if it’s read the APM Body of Knowledge, it even includes a task to ‘conduct mission review and intelligence transfer’. Lessons learned! Shame Ethan Hunt never seems to learn his lessons.

Score: 9/10

Then stage gate five is the rather dull‑sounding ‘Official mission closure and IMF briefing’. This sort of happens in the movies, usually in the form of someone higher up than the original project sponsor patting Hunt on the back and commiserating him about that one IMF team member he fell in love with getting killed.

But ChatGPT’s tasks in this stage sound fun to roll out on your next project: ‘disrupt remaining threats or rogue elements’ feels more dramatic than ‘ensure user documentation is well indexed’. Although project managers may recognise ‘fabricate plausible deniability narratives.’ Well, you don’t get to run a PMO (or the IMF) without a bit of politicking.

Score: 5/10