When Projects Meet Reality: Failure, Limits, and a New Way Forward

# PRINCE2

Rethinking Project Success in an Unpredictable World

April 29, 2026

Alexei Kuvshinnikov

When Projects Meet Reality: Failure, Limits, and a New Way Forward

This series of posts was inspired by the work of Fabio Guarraci.

Projects fail. And rather often they do, too. Projects flop while they fail to produce the desired project product within the agreed performance targets. And even when they manage to celebrate the rites of passage, it is not unusual for businesses and organisations that commission projects to fail to change their ways of working and culture in order to successfully transition project products to operations, and embed outcomes of benefit. That doesn’t come as a big surprise to anyone involved in project management. After all, projects aim to introduce change. And change is fraught with increased exposure to risk, including the risk of failure.

Small projects fail in unremarkable ways, without causing a ripple. Large projects fail with a bang. Be it in construction, technology, financial services, you name it. And then there are the XXXL-sized projects whose scale will take anyone’s breath away. Like Howard Hughes’s ‘Spruce Goose’ flying boat. These sometimes end in epic fiascos that leave stunned even seasoned professionals.

In a good case, gigantism can be a consequence of functional choices tailored to a specific operational domain that translate into a need to create and control a platform of an extraordinary operational capability. In the other, it’s the naughty belief that the project’s best chance of success is to become too large to fail. But they fail regardless, leaving huge craters in the landscape.

Even state-of-the-art projects created and run by absolute experts are far from being immune to failure. Some project management pundits thrive on preaching resilience, meaning the project’s ability to sustain, absorb, and repair damage. To fight their way back. Some others focus on advocacy for robustness, that is, project’s ability to resist failure from damage by compensating for its impact, without compromising the project’s performance targets. To me, this distinction appears being of a rather subtle, and mostly semantic, nature.

One cause of terminal project failure appears to be aiming project defenses from the outset to achieve an impossible state of invulnerability, to deny in the abstract the very possibility that the energy of any external event could conceivably exceed the project design assumptions. Tempting, but such inference wrongly assumes that threat energy levels are finite within the boundaries of divine providence. As spoken by Lord Henry Wotton, a character from ‘The picture of Dorian Grey’, vanity is my favourite sin.

Project design will typically assume alleged survival conditions and the threshold of failure. Accordingly, it will include some kind of a defense system dimensioned for a specific threat energy domain and enhanced by measures that can augment its resilience and/or robustness.

Projects are subject not only to man-made threats. Arguably more critical is their exposure to volatility of market forces and opacity of market dynamics that unleash unexpectable conflagrations on a scale that fell projects by the thousand. When the actually applied threat energy systematically exceeds the project’s design assumptions, its capability of survival will become progressively overwhelmed.

As a result of increasing saturation, the project defense system will eventually reach critical stability conditions, and ultimately exceed them, giving way to systemic collapse. A structure, pushed beyond its limits, will inevitably fail. Resilience or robustness may delay the outcome, but not prevent it.

Last but not least, many projects are internally coherent and well designed with the best of intentions. But that assessment may confuse design with employment. If you put a chunk of deep-frozen meat into a grinder, you won’t get neatly shaped frozen patties at the other end. When such substitution of operational domain occurs, or simply happens, be it through intent or ignorance, even a fully rational system pushed outside its operational domain will become highly exposed to the possibility of failure.

So, in the end, it seems that neither design nor character have big impact on the project fate. It’s all in the stars, isn’t it?

It is, sort of. Though not quite. As a PRINCE2 adept, I tend to look at challenges in project and programme management through its lens. So, can PRINCE2 help to prevent project failure?

Well, PRINCE2 does offer some techniques that aim to reduce the damage caused by unavoidable threat energy impacts by absorbing or dissipating them. Here’s a bow to resilience. It is also fit for the purpose of denying the sustained exposure to threat energy impacts translating into the temporal sequence of progressive deterioration ending with final collapse. Here’s a salute to robustness.

But this PRINCE2 capability for enhancing project resilience and robustness, admirable as it may be, still comes short of solving the issue of responding to sudden or gradually accumulating qualitative changes to the project threat domain. Simply said, no currently known system of project design nor method of project management can be expected to reliably prevent project demise. One of modes of failure is governed by threshold exceedance and abrupt functional collapse at the point where damage exceeds survivability limits and becomes operationally irreversible. An alternative mode of failure is time-extended progressive saturation causing prolonged degradation followed by gradual collapse.

Using PRINCE2, projects can be designed to resist a threat energy level that may be very high, but still finite. However, the very evolution of the global environment will almost inevitably result in the creation of new and previously unheard-of threats. While the number of possible futures is infinite, there is no way we can counter that with an infinite number of risk responses. So, how can the project be armed against the unknown and the unknowable?

I see anti-fragility of project governance offering a path that may be worth exploring. Nassim Nicholas Taleb coined and pioneered this concept, which in broad terms describes a property of systems to increase in their capability to thrive as a result of stressors, shocks, volatility, noise, mistakes, faults, attacks, or failures. It is not a chimera. It exists and is gaining acceptance in an ever-growing number of areas of human endeavour.

In the project management context, its application could then begin with treating a threat to the project – any threat, that is the key - as an opportunity, and involve identifying and implementing a response that would aim to enhance, rather simply exploit, it. A predictably terminal threat energy impact may lead to a high-velocity saturation and collapse of project defenses, but it still won’t happen in the blink of an eye, unlike for example, in a nuclear blast. There will always remain at least a, relatively speaking, split second for reaction.

The project governance will need to be in possession of a capability for instantaneously, or at least sufficiently quickly, learning from mistakes that have put the project at risk, and essentially in the same breath figuring out and implementing changes to ways of working and project governance, before the negative energy impact could cause terminal damage. Invulnerability suddenly becomes attainable, if viewed as a function of anti-fragility.

Project management could learn from judo, where one yields to the force of assault in order to reverse it and turn the opponent's strength and momentum against them.

How can that be humanly accomplished? I don’t know, I am particularly unsure about the human part, so maybe with a little AI help?

The current versions of PRINCE2 project and programme management methods do not refer to anti-fragility. Maybe a path that would close this gap is worthy of exploring as a next step-change in its evolution.

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