Chapter: Beyond Competence: Developing Managers of Complex Projects, Lynn Crawford and Ed Hoffman (in the book by Terry Cooke-Davies) discuss the means of developing reflective practitioners (p. 92).
In that section they state:
Experience and education cannot be directly equated to each other. For some experiences are mis-educative. Any experience is mis-educative that has the effect of arresting or distorting the growth of further experience." For learning from experience to be effective, the learner must be self-aware and have a degree of humility that may be missing in some practitioners especially if they believe and have certifications to attest to their "competence" as project managers.
Do you agree with Crawford and Hoffman?
Please expand on your thoughts regarding the world of project complexities and whether they contain inherent characteristics that are mis-educative?
Is it not the wickedness discussed by Lynelle Briggs and that "project management training that reduces all the tasks of a project manager to a simple and straightforward rational, linear, and deterministic set of predefined processes and activities, tends to increase the challenges of systemicity by developing project personnel who are not on the lookout for the project's interconnectedness" (Chapter 1 p. 6)?
Which, as a consequence means that the competence approach will in fact increase the complexities of a project rather than reducing them in an orderly manner!
Book - ASPECTS OF COMPLEXITY: MANAGING PROJECTS IN A COMPLEX WORLD by Editor in Chief Terry Cooke-Davies, PhD
Tackling wicked problems : A public policy perspective by Australian Public Service Commission