Inhalt : The Project Journey and What do to if all the terms are fucked-up?

The session as it took place was provoked by Niels' keynote and his statement that we cannot use terms like management anymore.

I very much appreciate the intention behind Niels statement. As I understood it: create a tension and thus a higher awareness of how much the language we use is influenced by the management mindset of the industrial age, determined by a command and control stance... Making distinctions is very important here.

On top of that, I have experienced that all terms have different meanings for different people - just new terms won't be the solution. We need something beyond terms to create shared understanding of what we are talking about (and this most of the time implies discovering a variety of understandings of a term and making agreements of it's meaning in our specific situation, especially in interdisciplinary teams, like you have in projects). 

One way of working on this is inviting people to create their own shared understanding of a project. And that's the intention behind The Project Journey. 

BEGINNING  

• the value game (find it in the book: http://overthefence.com.de/project-management-book/, free download)
• Our guiding question: What does it take to invite a diverse group of people to create a shared understanding of their project (without imposing any specific language or PM school)?
  The OverTheFence Project Canvas - based on the metaphor of a project as "Journey through the unknown" (Indiana Jones is already using it – watch the video explanation, created by students of an international PM master programme in Berlin)
  
  get the full story from our TEDx talk
•  
   

MIDDLE

• Project Journey Game experience (http://overthefence.com.de/tools/)

END

in the end we connected the project journey experience with the guiding question of the session in a free flow conversation...

Around the question what is important: We had kind of a competition making distinctions and creating a shared experience/understanding.

I believe they are two pillars of the same bridge (a metaphor Yan Bello was using in his keynote on the second day).

Thank you all for playing and please feel free to add to this documentation....

--- by Karen Schmidt (on twitter @karen_ks and @overthefencePM)

get the project canvas and first chapter of our book here  www.overthefence.com.de use it - share it - co-create it!

if you want to play with the Project Journey Game, I am happy to help / send you the materials.