Understanding the current state of a complex project is challenging but essential for project teams to make effective management decisions. This webinar will introduce recently published research (Hackman et al., 2024) that demonstrated a new approach to informing project team management decisions about the current state of complex projects.

In longitudinal case studies of two complex projects, project team and stakeholder’s individual perceptions of the complex project were measured in real-time to provide a window into their evolving situation models of the complex project. The research explored whether comparisons of these situation models by the project team would encourage double loop learning about the current state of the complex project to inform their management decisions.

The new approach based on highlighting the differences in situation models was found to facilitate project team double loop learning, informing and prompting effective management decisions. The practical implications of this finding for teams managing complex projects will be discussed.