Lucid Ignorance and Project Process

This January, I learned three expressions related to my work that I want to share.  This post is about the first of the three, “lucid ignorance.”

On January 12-13, I was fortunate to be able to attend Microsoft-sponsored training in the Microsoft Solutions Framework (MSF).  As a self-professed process geek, whether it’s the PMBOK, client-specific process analysis, or any flavor of capabilities maturity model, I enjoy thinking about how people go about their jobs and create common vocabularies, and this training was no different.

The MSF is Microsoft’s standard framework designed to help lend structure to application development and implementation projects, and it’s a framework that we at KMA will be employing more aggressively in the days to come.

 

In addition to the overview of roles, risk analysis, phases, deliverables, and milestones prescribed by the MSF, a phrase our instructor used in describing project participants’ state at project initiation stuck with me:  “lucid ignorance.”  Lucid ignorance is used to describe our state during the “envisioning” phase of the project:  we have formed a clear scope and vision for the project, but we have yet to test that vision the way we need to in the planning phase:  by establishing technical feasibility, lining up resource requirements and risks within organizational constraints, performing high-level design activities, etc.  In other words, we're smart, and we know what we know, but we don't yet know what we don't know. 

The concept of lucid ignorance underscores the need to “re-baseline” the project during a rigorous planning phase.  The activities of the envisioning phase are sufficient to develop initial, order-of-magnitude estimates and an understanding of the “shape” of the project, but without planning and testing of our initial assumptions, we are still mired among “unknown unknowns.” It’s imperative that we re-assess initial estimates of cost, timing, and scope in light of things we discover during a more detailed planning process, and leave room to do this properly right from project outset.

If both scope and cost are locked in at the outset of the project, especially an application development project, proceed with caution!  Don’t lose track of the fact that, at that point in the project, all project stakeholders are lucidly ignorant.  The cure for lucid ignorance is another process-geek term (shocker!):  “progressive elaboration,” where the degree of uncertainty gets narrower and narrower as the project progresses.