Project Managers Can Change the World

Did anyone else want to change the world when they grew up?

Maybe this dream was top-of-mind and you talked about it with family and friends. Maybe it was hidden under layers of shame, fear, or self-doubt…but you knew it was there and what it was.

I seem to have fared better than most when it comes to shame, fear, and self-doubt, but as a child my obstacles looked like anxiety, loneliness, and general overwhelm at how I’d become an adult who could pay all my bills. Social anxiety was a particular struggle of mine for years…I didn’t feel confident in my relationships or in navigating social situations. In hindsight social anxiety, and my journey to overcome it, has felt like the defining feature of my childhood.

Yet alongside the struggles, I believed I could do something big. Maybe being academically top of my class, being given the “gifted and talented” label, or the impressed reactions of family and friends to my ideas and creations are what lit this fire and kept fanning it.

What does changing the world actually look like? What big thing did I think I would do? I don’t think I tried to define it back then. I just believed I had the ability to do something meaningful that would alter the course of some part of human history and make a positive impact on the lives of some group of people.

But there were too many unknowns in terms of how my abilities would develop and what opportunities I’d be given, like the hazy part of the horizon that you can’t quite make out yet. I also knew I’d need to meet other goals and manage my own needs along the way: I longed to navigate my way to deep, lasting relationships. I’d need to financially support myself and my family.

Fast-forward to today, in my 30s, and my dream of changing the world is still alive—with my biggest impact, I hope, still ahead of me. There are a few more “knowns” in my life in terms of stable relationships, sources of income, and where I’ll live for the foreseeable future. I have a few more specific ideas of the kind of impact I’d like to have, if the doors open for me to do so.

But here’s what I want to tell YOU, current or aspiring project manager: the career of project management has become a major part of my answer to the question “how will I change the world?” Not because it defines what kind of difference I’ll make, but because it is the very practical set of tools and skills that one needs to realize any big, impactful goal that will have a lot of unknowns along the way. This is the very nature of endeavors that are world-changing.

Becoming a great project manager has, very practically, equipped me to be an effective world-changer. Because any impactful change to the world is still, at the end of the day, a big project that has met its goals. And this is exactly where project managers excel.

Here are some of the major skillsets of project managers that are exactly what world-changing projects need to succeed:

1. Defining and clarifying a goal. Any good project manager knows it is critical to know where you are going before you commit too much time, money, or resources “just to get moving.” There is room to work out details of the approach along the way, but you must know what outcome you are setting out to achieve, know how you will determine if you are successful, and ensure everybody involved in the project agrees on what these things are. You can’t go somewhere meaningful if you don’t really know where you are going.
2. Defining what it will REALLY take to achieve that goal. Once the goal is clear, it is time to chart the path between where you are now and where you want to be. In some cases, that will mean defining every single task that needs to happen, by whom, in what order before any work begins (a more “waterfall” approach). In other cases, it will mean defining just enough about the process to confirm that your goal is actually achievable, while also clarifying when you’ll come back and define the details about each aspect of the work to be done (a more “agile” approach). A project manager will know what approach to charting this path will be most effective for the project at hand.
3. Accounting for unknowns. A major feature of all projects, especially world-changing ones, is unknowns. Project management is the art and science of being able to estimate (with tolerances) how much time, money, and resources it will take to meet a goal, even with unknowns involved. We define what we can, and we have techniques to still make realistic estimates and plans in the face of what we can’t know or define.
4. Combining the people and technical skills that pursuing a big goal requires. In addition to all our technical skills of creating schedules, tracking budgets, accounting for unknowns, and more, a major part of the job is working with people, motivating people, and shepherding them toward the project’s goal. Working with people can be complex and frustrating or magical and rewarding depending on the day, but we have the passion and the skills to dive into the chaos that people introduce and move our project teams forward on all of these days. We have the professional range to be both process engineers and people therapists, because meeting big goals requires work on both ends of this spectrum.
5. Addressing change so it doesn’t threaten the goal. Change is a constant. Project managers have methods to dance with the changes that come from both outside and inside the project, facilitating exactly the project changes that are necessary to ensure the goal is still met, and no more. We gather the right information and pull in the right people to make decisions about change in an organized way—and communicate about change in an organized way—in spite of the chaotic ways that change arises.

I’ve had a chance to work on some meaningful projects. But my childhood dream of changing the world lives on, and I am still fired up about bigger, more impactful projects I hope I get to lead in the future. What I know now is that I have the specific skills and knowledge required to make big, important, world-changing goals achievable, and I have my career in the field of project management to thank for that.

This is why project managers can change the world.