Mary Parker Follett’s ideas underpinned my book “Beyond Agile” that linked the people side of productivity to the mechanics of value delivery. In my mind, she is the true forgotten hero of project management, regardless of which industry you work in. Enid Mumford and James Martin are heroes in the IT and product space, but Mary Parker Follett was a true heavy-hitter, spanning all types of project management.
Her ideas were skipped over when the easier-to-explain concepts of Frederick Winslow Taylor became codified as project management theory. Early editions of the PMBOK Guide and PRINCE2 focused on the math, logic and procedural elements of Taylor’s project planning and scheduling.
Later, PM frameworks tried to retrofit the importance of motivation, emotional intelligence, and soft skills with no reliable attachment points. The result was a confusing mix, asking project managers to do the equivalent of “tap their heads and rub their stomach at the same time”, something most participants struggled to complete convincingly.
Most project managers navigate this daily tension that rarely gets named. Structured plans, scope control, and governance systems designed to keep delivery on track sit on one side. Collaborative sense-making, team authority, and the kind of emergent problem-solving that no Gantt chart can contain, sit on the other side. We reach for the first when planning, and for the second when the team needs to determine why the plan is not working.
Most practitioners know the name attached to the first half of that equation. Frederick Winslow Taylor published his Principles of Scientific Management in 1911, and his ideas became the intellectual foundation of professional project management. His ideas are on every work breakdown structure, every early PMBOK process, and every performance review built around measurable outputs.
Far fewer practitioners know the name attached to the other half. Warren Bennis, one of the 20th century’s most respected leadership scholars, made the point plainly in 2003. He wrote: “Just about everything written today about leadership and organizations comes from Mary Parker Follett’s writings and lectures.” Most project managers have never heard of her, and I think we need to address that.
The Woman Who Started in Roxbury
Follett was born in 1868 in Quincy, Massachusetts. Her father, a skilled tradesman, died when she was young, and responsibility for her invalid mother and younger brother fell entirely to her. She managed the family’s finances and household from her teens, learning early that coordination is a matter of relationships and trust rather than positional authority.
Her determination to study never wavered. She enrolled in correspondence courses to keep learning through the family obligations, then made her way to Radcliffe College, Harvard’s women’s university. She also studied at Newnham College, Cambridge, and did postgraduate work in Paris before she graduated summa cum laude in 1898. Her emphases in economics, government, law, and philosophy. Her Radcliffe thesis on the Speaker of the US House of Representatives drew a review from Theodore Roosevelt, who called it “the best work ever written on the subject.”
What she did next is the part that shaped everything.
Rather than pursuing an academic post, Follett spent twenty-five years doing community organizing in Roxbury, a poor immigrant neighborhood in Boston. She organized the Roxbury Debating Club in 1900, a structured space for democratic dialogue in a community that had very few of them. She built a network of after-hours school centers, choosing public school buildings deliberately over settlement houses, which she felt positioned the middle class as charitable helpers rather than genuine partners.
By 1914, the network she helped create served around 7,000 people a week across six Boston high schools. These centers set their own budgets, evaluated their own programs, and improved continuously, with no top-down management structure directing them.
Diverse groups of volunteers, including education officials, social workers, and neighborhood representatives, consistently outperformed what any single expert or hierarchical body could have managed on its own. That observation became the bedrock of her management philosophy.
The Big Ideas
Follett’s 1924 book Creative Experience brought her to business audiences and launched her consulting career. She became one of the most sought-after management consultants of the late 1920s, on both sides of the Atlantic. She was among the first women invited to address the London School of Economics. Her lecture series for New York’s Bureau of Personnel Administration became, after her death, the collection published as Dynamic Administration. The ideas in those lectures were precise, practical, and pointed in the opposite direction from Taylor.
Power-With, not Power-Over
This is her most quoted idea: “One person should not give orders to another person, but both should agree to take their orders from the situation.” She called it depersonalized authority. The person with the clearest understanding of the current situation, not the person with the highest rank, holds the most relevant authority in that moment. The engineer who grasps the technical constraint decides the technical approach. The user closest to the problem decides what matters to users. Rank does not disappear; it simply stops being the primary factor in who gets to decide what.
Take Orders from the Situation
This is her most quoted idea: “One person should not give orders to another person, but both should agree to take their orders from the situation.” She called it depersonalized authority. The person with the clearest understanding of the current situation, not the person with the highest rank, holds the most relevant authority in that moment. The engineer who grasps the technical constraint decides the technical approach. The user closest to the problem decides what matters to users. Rank does not disappear; it simply stops being the primary factor in who gets to decide what.
Constructive Conflict
Follett reframed conflict as a signal of diversity, and therefore a resource. She identified three different ways to respond to conflict. Domination produces a winner and a resentful loser. Compromise leaves both parties partially dissatisfied, with the underlying tension still intact. Integration finds a solution that genuinely satisfies both parties’ underlying interests. She illustrated integration with a deceptively simple example.
Two people in a library: one wants the window open, one wants it shut. Compromise gives a half-open window that pleases neither. Integration asks why, discovers one person wants fresh air and one wants to avoid a draft, and opens a window in the adjacent room. Both underlying needs are satisfied without either party conceding anything.
The Creative Group
Follett believed the collective intelligence of a well-facilitated group surpasses any individual’s, including the designated expert’s. “The potentialities of the individual remain potentialities until they are released by group life,” she wrote in The New State in 1918. Leadership, on her account, is not about directing people but about releasing what they are already capable of. “Leadership is not defined by the exercise of power but by the capacity to increase the sense of power among those led. The most essential work of the leader is to create more leaders.”
Taylor and Follett Side by Side
Taylor and Follett were contemporaries who almost certainly never met. He died in 1915, before her management consulting career had properly begun. They did not debate each other; they simply started from different assumptions about human nature and built entire systems on those assumptions.
A 2019 paper by Anna Rylander Eklund and Barbara Simpson, “The Duality of Design(ing) Successful Projects,” puts a useful frame on this contrast. They describe two orientations that project management requires. The first, “Design” (the noun), is the Taylorist view: projects are deliverables, plans, and specifications to be executed faithfully. The second, “Designing” (the verb), is the Follettian view: projects are ongoing social processes of collective sense-making.
Their argument is that successful projects require both orientations simultaneously, much as light is simultaneously a wave and a particle.
To describe the philosophical assumption underlying each orientation, Eklund and Simpson introduce the Swedish concept of människosyn (pronounced roughly “men-ish-uh-seen”). It means “view of human beings,” your fundamental assumptions about what people are and what they are capable of. Taylor’s människosyn treats workers as passive instruments requiring direction. Follett’s människosyn treats them as fundamentally creative agents capable of self-organization and genuine contribution.
The paper argues that holding a dual människosyn, the ability to shift consciously between these two orientations depending on what the situation requires, is what effective hybrid project management demands. I have been working in the hybrid space for over thrity years. I used Taylor on constrained-delivery work and for Follett on complex, adaptive challenges long before I had a word for what I was doing. Människosyn is that word, and having it changes the quality of the question you ask yourself mid-project.
Follett’s New State also anticipated something else: the networked, self-managing organizations that Frédéric Laloux describes as “Teal”. Her 1918 proposal to replace hierarchical governance with networks of self-organizing groups reads, at a century’s distance, as a first sketch of what Laloux would later formalize as Teal Organizations.
Follett’s Ideas as they relate to Agile and Lean
Agile was not invented at the Snowbird ski resort in February 2001. It’s ideas had been circulating for decades through the Human Relations movement, socio-technical design, and the Japanese management wave. Follett did not cause agile, but her människosyn is woven through its foundations at every level.
The bridge between Follett and agile runs partly through the Human Relations movement. Elton Mayo’s Hawthorne experiments at Western Electric, conducted between 1927 and 1932, demonstrated independently that social and psychological factors matter more to productivity than physical conditions or financial incentives alone. Mayo reached conclusions Follett had already described, and his work carried those ideas forward through the mid-twentieth century into the foundations that agile would later build on.
Servant Leadership
Is Follett’s Power-With given a job title. The Scrum Master role is an implementation of her concept: authority should expand the group’s capability rather than concentrate at the top. A Scrum Master removes impediments, facilitates the team, and protects the team’s capacity to do its work.
Self-Organizing Teams
Are what Follett observed in Roxbury in 1910, before the term existed. Her community volunteers set budgets, evaluated results, and improved their programs continuously with no manager directing them from above. The Agile Manifesto principle that “the best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams” is a rediscovery of something she experienced and documented firsthand.
Retrospectives
Retrospectives are the institutionalization of constructive conflict and integration. The retrospective is a structured space for surfacing real tensions, examining them honestly, and working toward solutions that serve the whole team’s needs. Follett’s insistence that conflict is a resource worth engaging rather than suppressing is the philosophical foundation that makes retrospectives worth running rather than just completing.
Respect for People
The second pillar of the Toyota Way, reads like a translation of Follett’s core assumption about human nature into manufacturing practice. Workers closest to the process know most about how to improve it, and management’s job is to create conditions for that knowledge to be applied. Toyota built a production system on that belief; Follett had articulated it four decades earlier.
Consult the Do-ers
In construction project management, the Last Planner System demonstrates what Follett said collaborative planning looks like in practice on complex build programs. Rather than having a central scheduler push directions down to field crews, Last Planner engages the people doing the work in planning the commitments they can genuinely keep. The result is better workflow, fewer surprises, and substantially stronger team accountability throughout the life of a project. Taylor planned for his workers; Follett planned with them. Last Planner made that distinction the centerpiece of its method.
The Prophet Nobody Listened To
Follett died in 1933, and her ideas largely disappeared from American management literature almost immediately afterward. The Taylorist, engineering-focused mainstream had no theoretical space for ideas about group dynamics, participative power, and constructive conflict. She was considered idealistic, and her social-work background made her suspect in circles that prized scientific rigor above relational insight.
Her work survived in the UK and was rediscovered in Japan in the 1960s. Japanese management thinkers found her ideas about group harmony, participative decision-making, and integration highly compatible with their own emerging management philosophy. Whether there is a direct documented line from Follett to the Toyota Production System remains unconfirmed, but the philosophical alignment is striking enough to note.
Peter Drucker found her early and called her his guru. Chester Barnard absorbed her ideas into his influential 1938 book The Functions of the Executive, which shaped a generation of management thinking, often without naming the source. Pauline Graham’s 1995 anthology Mary Parker Follett: Prophet of Management (Harvard Business School Press) finally triggered a genuine revival.
This was the book I read, and it brought her key papers back into print alongside essays from Drucker, Bennis, and other major management thinkers. Today her name graces awards in political science, conflict resolution, accounting, and organizational science. She was approximately fifty years early, and the world eventually caught up.
The Mindset (Människosyn) Question
Here is the practical question Follett leaves every project manager with.
Every project has moments when the Taylor människosyn is exactly right. Estimates need defending, schedules needs precision, and someone must make the call because genuine ambiguity at that moment is harmful rather than helpful. In those situations, a clear plan and clear authority are what the situation requires.
Every project also has moments when the Follett människosyn is exactly right. The problem is too complex for any individual to solve alone. The team holds knowledge that no manager can match from a distance. The conflict on the board is not a distraction from the real work; it is the sign that tells us where the real misalignment lives. In those moments, integration and shared authority will produce an outcome that no individual could have designed in advance.
The most useful question to ask in each of those moments is this: what is my mindset (människosyn) right now? Am I treating the people on this project as instruments to be deployed toward a predetermined solution, or as a creative community capable of finding a better one? Both answers are sometimes exactly right. The skill is in knowing which one fits, and in being able to shift between them with enough awareness that the shift is conscious rather than accidental.
If you work in an industry that is largely defined, predictable and slow to change, likely a Taylorist mindset should your default thinking. However, if your industry is undefined, difficult to predict and changing rapidly, Follett should be your default mindset.
My career in software and product development has been mostly the upper-right quadrant kind. The traditional tools were only a 30% solution; finding Follett gave me the missing 70% for project success, which I had been trying to pull from intuition.
Follett articulated these ideas so clearly in the 1920s. The fact that most practitioners are still rediscovering them a century later is telling. Some good ideas travel slowly, especially if they are more complicated than the alternative.
“Unity, not uniformity, must be our aim,” she wrote in 1918. “We attain unity only through variety. Differences must be integrated, not annihilated, nor absorbed.“
That remains the most useful thing anyone has written about managing a diverse project team. It took the world a hundred years to catch up, and most of us are still working on it.
