2.5 Summary

In his book The Fifth Discipline, Senge [33] wrote, "Business and other human endeavors are bound by invisible fabrics of interrelated actions, which often take years to fully play out their effects on each other. Since we are part of that lacework ourselves, it's doubly hard to see the whole pattern of change. Instead, we tend to focus on snapshots of isolated parts of the system, and wonder why our deepest problems never seem to get solved." What practitioners commonly call the real world is a mere reflection of this phenomenon. The real world is not the result of natural forces and immutable principles at play; it reflects to a great extent the consequence of past decisions taken without a complete understanding of their ramifications.

A systematic understanding of the limitations of human performance and organizational capabilities is a precondition for meeting the challenges arising from the multiproject environment.