Project Management Is a Language Game

As project managers we are often confused about what we do, and therefore how we think of ourselves. The episteme and the techne are not our domains. We engage with the knowledge workers, and we often have a deep understanding of their domains but are not knowledge workers ourselves . Nonetheless, we often spend our formative years gaining knowledge of tools and techniques whose usefulness is ephemeral at best. Instead of situating the problems we confront within our existing knowledge paradigm, in this chapter, we work backwards from the problem and ask: what paradigm does this problem demand? Stepping away from theory and paying close attention to our work reveals that project management is the skill of using language to influence people towards a specific outcome . That is what we do every day, multiple times a day. This leads us to phronesis as the domain appropriate to the practice of project management. Phronesis eschews formal bodies of theoretical and procedural knowledge for a knowing that is embodied and orientated towards action. It does not deny the need for bodies of knowledge and puts them to work as necessary, but is not one itself .