Twenty years ago today, on August 29, 2006, I published the first posts on LeadingAnswers.com.
That sentence makes me feel old.
I started the blog to write about leadership and agile project management, share ideas I was experimenting with, and hopefully connect with other people interested in the same things. At the time, agile was still sufficiently new that explaining it to traditional project managers was a large part of the job.
My first real article was called “What has Leadership got to do with Agile Project Management?” My argument was that effective agile project management was much closer to leadership than traditional project management. It emphasized people over tasks, empowerment over control, effectiveness over efficiency, and direction over speed.
Twenty years later, I am writing about how project managers might lead teams containing AI agents. Quite a lot has changed. Yet, looking back through the old articles, I am struck by how much has not.
The More Things Change…
In that first post, I was interested in leadership because I thought the people side of project management was being undervalued. Traditional project management guidance was very good at decomposition, planning, estimating and tracking. However, projects were delivered by people, and people stubbornly refused to behave like tasks on a Gantt chart.
Agile helped address some of this. It emphasized collaboration, feedback, empowered teams and adaptation. So, much of my early writing explored the intersection of these worlds: how agile teams should estimate, what the project manager’s role was on an agile project, when leaders should step in and when they should step back, how teams could make better decisions, how we could manage risks without creating process for the sake of process, and how we could communicate complex information visually.
Some of the terminology now looks dated, but the problems do not.
By the first anniversary of LeadingAnswers I had somehow produced 82 articles, and the site had received 33,000 visitors from 127 countries. I clearly had more spare time then.
I was also delighted by the conversations it generated. Blogging connected me with people I would probably never otherwise have met, and writing forced me to examine ideas more carefully. There is nothing quite like explaining something publicly for discovering the gaps in your own thinking. That is probably the biggest benefit I have received from this site.
Agile Grew Up
The agile world also changed enormously. In 2006, agile still needed explaining and defending in many organizations. Then it crossed into the mainstream. Scrum certifications proliferated, organizations embarked on enterprise agile transformations, scaling frameworks appeared, and eventually everyone seemed to be agile whether they behaved that way or not.
That created a different set of problems. I became increasingly interested in what happened when good ideas became processes to follow. Agile had started partly as a reaction against excessive process, yet some organizations managed to turn agile itself into excessive process.
This pushed my thinking toward tailoring and situational approaches. There is no universally best development approach. Agile is not always right. Predictive approaches are not always wrong. Scrum is a useful tool, not a religion.
Sometimes the stakeholder really does need a WBS. So, just give them one.
This eventually led to the ideas behind Beyond Agile. Learn broadly, understand lots of approaches, but implement selectively. Process has weight, while knowledge is largely weightless. The goal is not to become exceptionally good at performing a methodology. The goal is to get useful work done.
Looking back, that feels like an evolution rather than a change of direction.
The People Side Never Went Away
Another recurring theme has been teams and leadership. Over the years, I have written about servant leadership, emotional intelligence, team decision-making, motivation, autonomy, collaboration, psychological safety, host leadership and many other topics that sometimes get labelled the “soft side” of project management.
I have never liked that description. Getting people to work together effectively is usually the hard side. Plans are relatively easy. Organizations are difficult. Humans are messy.
My recent PM Heroes articles about Enid Mumford, James Martin and Mary Parker Follett reminded me that many of the ideas I find most useful today are not new at all. We regularly rediscover old ideas, give them new names, and then congratulate ourselves on our innovation.
Technology changes quickly. Human nature has a much slower release cycle.
Now AI Turns Up
Which brings us to AI.
For the last couple of years, AI has increasingly occupied my attention. Initially, I was concerned about some fairly superficial applications of generative AI to project management. Project management does not have a typing speed problem. Generating a project charter in 30 seconds is not particularly useful if nobody has spoken to the stakeholders, and producing an impressive-looking schedule instantly is worse than useless if the assumptions behind it are nonsense.
Once again, the interesting issues are not really about the tool. They are about how people use it.
More recently, I started experimenting with autonomous AI agents. What began as a proof of concept became one of the most interesting technology experiments I have undertaken in decades. Now I am running AI agents to perform real work and exploring what it means for project managers when teams consist of people, people augmented by AI, and autonomous AI workers.
On the surface, this seems a very long way from that first LeadingAnswers article in 2006. I am not sure it is.
The question then was:
- How do we lead people doing complex knowledge work rather than just manage their tasks?
The question now is becoming:
- How do we lead a mixed team of people and machines doing complex knowledge work?
Apparently, I have been working on the same problem for twenty years.
Twenty Years Later
There are plenty of things I would write differently if I were starting LeadingAnswers today. Some old predictions were wrong. Some concerns never materialized. Some ideas I once thought were important now seem less useful.
Good. If I agreed with everything I wrote twenty years ago, I probably had not learned very much.
However, I am pleased that a few principles have survived reasonably intact. Be skeptical of simple solutions to complex problems. Use whatever approach fits the situation rather than defending a methodology. Focus on outcomes rather than process compliance. Make complicated ideas easier to understand. Remember that projects are fundamentally about people.
And keep experimenting.
That last one may be the most important. LeadingAnswers started because I wanted somewhere to explore ideas. Twenty years later, that is still what I use it for. The subjects have moved from agile project management, leadership and estimation through PMI, team performance, visual learning, tailoring and Beyond Agile, and now into artificial intelligence and agentic teams.
I have no idea what I will be writing about in another twenty years. Actually, I will probably be complaining that the autonomous project management robots are applying AI approaches too rigidly and need to pay more attention to people.
Some things never change.
Thanks to everyone who has read, commented, challenged an idea, shared an article, attended a course, bought a book, or simply wandered onto LeadingAnswers through a search result over the last twenty years. You made writing it worthwhile.
On to year 21.
