پیچیدگی، تردید و مدل های ذهنی: ایجاد الگویی تنظیمی برای الگوی پیدایش در مدیریت پروژه Complexity, uncertainty and mental models: From a paradigm of regulation to a paradigm of emergence in project management

1. Executive summary It is generally understood that the world is becoming more and more complex. Project managers are experiencing this in their daily activities, being faced with a growing number of complex situations. The project management literature – particularly in the non-deterministic paradigm – has focused on this issue of complexity. However, two perspectives – project management and the management of projects – co-exist in the project management research community, as do two paradigms: deterministic and non-deterministic. This lack of unified theory – as well as the difficulty of agreeing on a definition of complexity – does not help project managers understand how to maximize performance in complex projects. The research presented here attempts to propose richer lenses for looking at project management. We suggest that a better understanding of the construct of complexity, its associated construct of uncertainty, and the way human beings predict these through mental models are possible groundings for a contingent and comprehensive approach. In this conceptual work, we first investigate the literature on complexity, highlighting three levels that can be found in different research works. We then investigate the literature on uncertainty, which also converges towards three levels of uncertainty. Finally, we add the notion of mental models as a means for project managers to understand the situations in which they find themselves, and gather all the findings in a conceptual model of project management. Our study adds to the literature on complexity and uncertainty in project management by gathering many existing research works from different sciences. Tables summarizing these literatures shed light on the possibility of identifying three different levels of complexity and of uncertainty, which form the pillars of a contingent project management model.