There are generally two ways describing the development of a project, or a collaborative activity: either as a landscape or as a narrative.
The description of project as landscape is normally quantitative, and graphically displayed. It often has indices such as ‘number of people’ or ‘scale of output.’ This proves very convenient for comparing projects, and measuring success.
The project as landscape can include the variable of time, but as a rigid, linear concept. This has clear advantages for formulating project planning tools such as Gant charts and timetables.
The description of project as narrative is generally much more qualitative. It enables a richer project vocabulary to develop. It has one meta-index that runs throughout the telling of the story – That of time. The other ‘indices’ fluctuate throughout the narrative, for example characters come and go, specific events begin and end.
It is possible to create meta-narratives to generally describe all projects; this could be a case study template, or a list of verbs that the description must use. However, each individual narrative will be just that – Individual, and dependent on the vocabulary of the storyteller.
Clearly, both methods have advantages, but at first glance they would appear contradictory. The ‘hard’ quantitative epistemology of the landscape and the ‘soft’ qualitative methodology of the narrative seem at odds with each other. I argue that this is not true, and that the two concepts can sit comfortably alongside each other, at the same time – In much the same way that light can be both a wave and a particle (this is called wave-particle duality) a project can be both a landscape and a narrative.
There are several ways of thinking about this. We could use the wave-particle duality metaphor – Which would state that a project is both a narrative and a landscape, but you can only measure one of these attributes at a time. This seems intuitively correct, but only because we are using a metaphor from the physical sciences that is provable and true.
Because the concept of a ‘project’ is culturally rather than empirically defined (as light is,) we can be a lot looser and more imaginative with our thinking. We could see a project as a narrative passing through a single landscape; we follow the story and at any point we can step back and start to measure specific parts of the landscape. Or, we could view the project as a series of landscapes, connected by a narrative: in this model we are constantly measuring the project landscape but the measurements are connected by narrative elements such as specific actors or events.
There is however a third way, which involves a total synthesis of the two methods. That is to describe the development of a project as the creation of a narrascape. In the narrascape the project is at once a story and a measurement. We measure to tell the story, and we narrate to get the measurements. This idea has two possible uses.
Firstly, it is a way of researching projects being done by ‘others’ that we are not fully part of (except in our role as a researcher.) This method of looking at projects would provide a richly textured description of the development, people, changes and outcomes encountered through the narrascape.
Secondly, and more interestingly, the narrascape provides a conceptual model for engaging, developing and delivering a project, whilst simultaneously researching and critically assessing it.
The narrascape is real. It is the natural home of the collaborative project, which by their very nature are rich in human emotions and feelings. Narrascapes can be viewed as distinct entities, but it is far more likely that a single narrascape contains many other diverse narrascapes within it.
The question thus posed is: Is there one meta-narrascape that contains all others? Or is the meta-narrascape a bottom up ‘emergent’ system? Whichever it is, it must have rules. Either super-rules for the top down system or local rules for the bottom up system. Finding the rules of the narrascape is the first step to developing better project management tools and resources to promote and support collaboration more effectively.