Project success: a human, adaptive, biologically grounded achievement
According to Professors Martin Morgan Tuuli & Lavagnon Ika,
Project success is a human, adaptive, and biologically grounded achievement, not merely a technical one.
You’ll find this statement in their concluding thoughts in Neuroscience for Project Success: People, Stress and Systems – the chapter Carole Osterweil contributed to their new book*.
They go on to say: “This chapter reframes project success as a human, adaptive, and biologically grounded achievement, not merely a technical one. It offers
- practitioners practical tools for sensing, regulating, and reshaping the threat–safety and stress dynamics that so often determine project outcomes
- academics a pathway for integrating neuroscience more explicitly into behavioural project management theory
- Successful projects are not only technically engineered systems – they are also continuously regulated neuro-behavioural systems.
- Performance, failure, recovery, and success emerge from how effectively perceptions of threat and safety, connection and meaning are managed across time.
- When leaders and organisations understand and work with, rather than against, these biological realities, they dramatically increase their capacity to deliver in uncertainty.
In a world increasingly defined by uncertainty, complexity, and high-stakes transformation, understanding how brains behave in projects may be as important as understanding how schedules and contracts work”
*Developing a Body of Knowledge in Behavioural Project Management: How and Why People and Projects Behave as They Do, a World Scientific Publishing title, due out in 2027
Photo by Eugene Golovesov on Unsplash