Another throwback debate that still challenges how we think about hiring, and ourselves Is accepting a job that one is under qualified for a disaster in the making?

That was the focus of the motion from a few years ago. The more I listen to this episode of the PM Debate Podcast, the more I realize this isn’t just a hiring question. It’s a leadership question, a self-awareness question, and a career-defining decision.

The Tension

On one side if you step into a role you’re not ready for, you risk everything.

* Losing the trust of your team

* Failing to deliver when it matters most

* Damaging your credibility before you’ve even built it

In project environments where timelines, budgets, and outcomes matter that risk is real.

On the other side if you only take roles you’re fully qualified for you

* You stop growing and stay in the shallow end.

* You repeat what you already know.

* You miss the very opportunities that shape your career.

The Line That Still Hits

Early in my career, I used to ask hiring managers:

“Do you want someone with one year of experience repeated fifteen times… or someone who actually knows how to do the job?”

It worked, but looking back (I’ll be honest) that confidence came with risk. Sometimes it worked because I grew into the role, sometimes it worked because I got lucky. That’s the part we don’t talk about enough.

The Real Question

This isn’t about being 100% qualified, after all, no one is. The real question is:

Are you stretching or are you stepping in over your head?

There’s a difference.

Three Checks Before You Say Yes

If you’re considering a role that feels like a stretch, ask yourself:

* Will this team trust me enough to follow me?

* Can I actually deliver what this role demands?

* Will leadership believe in me when things get tough?

If the answer to any of these is no, you’re probably going beyond stretching yourself to gambling with the role or relying a bit too much on luck.

What This Means for Hiring

Hiring managers face the same dilemma. We often wonder if we should play it safe and hire that fully qualified candidate or take a chance on someone who could become exceptional. The problem is most systems are built to filter out potential before it ever gets a chance.

Final Thought

The best careers aren’t built by playing it safe, but they’re also not built on blind risk. Success in a role and in a career is built in that uncomfortable space between where you’re not quite ready but you’re ready enough.

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When a crisis hits, everyone wants quick action. But fast without structure isn’t decisive, it’s just chaotic.

Back in 2017, Mary Elizabeth and I debated a motion that sits at the intersection of two very different disciplines:

“The project management framework and its principles are ill suited for managing a crisis.”

It sounds provocative, and it was meant to challenge assumptions and explore the topic.

The Core Debate

The argument for the motion:

* A crisis isn’t a project. It doesn’t get “created”, it erupts.

* The scale of coordination required goes far beyond typical stakeholder management.

* First responders, government leaders, community organizations, and the public don’t make a project team. That’s a different operating model entirely.

* PM gave us a strong framework for recovery, but response? That belongs to a different discipline.

The argument against the motion:

* Crisis management and project management share more DNA than people admit.

* Risk planning, communication frameworks, and resource distribution. All of these core PM tools are directly applicable under pressure.

* The real criticism isn’t the framework, It’s the misapplication of it.

* Agile proved PM can move fast when the context demands it, crisis is no different.

The clear tension to consider is this: PM is a powerful tool but only if you know which problem you’re holding it up against.

Why This Still Matters in 2026

Crises haven’t gotten simpler. If anything, they’ve multiplied.

Organizational shutdowns, supply chain collapses, reputational emergencies, and geopolitical disruption all impact program delivery.

In most organizations, when a crisis hits, one of two things happens:

* Someone pulls out a project plan and tries to run the response like a workstream.

* Or nobody pulls out anything, and it’s improvised chaos from minute one.

Both are wrong.

The real question this episode was pointing at is all about the application of the framework.

3 Questions for Today’s Leaders

* Does your organization have a crisis response capability, or just a project plan it hopes will stretch far enough?

* When the last disruption hit, did PM discipline help or slow things down?

* What’s the line in your context between “crisis response” and “recovery project” and who owns each side of it?

🎧 Episode 35 is live now.

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Project teams often say they want transparency but executives often say transparency has limits. So which is it?

This week’s throwback episode from the Project Management Debate Podcast tackles a question that sits right at the intersection of leadership, ethics, and strategy:

Do project team members and key stakeholders deserve full disclosure at all times?

It’s a deceptively simple question. But once you dig into it, the answer becomes far more complicated.

The Case for Full Disclosure

One of the strongest arguments for transparency is simple: withholding information usually backfires.

When project leaders hold back critical details, three things tend to happen:

* Suppliers misunderstand the real requirements.Organizations sometimes conceal details to gain negotiating leverage. But suppliers eventually uncover the truth and by then, trust has already eroded.

* Teams lose morale and motivation.Artificial deadlines or hidden constraints can make work feel impossible. When teams sense the goalposts aren’t real, they disengage.

* Relationships break down.When risks or major changes are hidden, teams feel excluded from solving the problem. By the time the truth surfaces, it’s often too late to recover.

The central argument here is not just ethical but also practical. Information gaps create risk.

The Case Against Full Disclosure

But there’s another side to the debate. Organizations operate in competitive environments. Sometimes sharing everything is simply not responsible leadership.

Consider a few common realities:

* A new product launch must remain confidential to avoid tipping off competitors.

* A merger is underway but cannot be disclosed until agreements are finalized.

* An internal restructuring could disrupt morale if shared prematurely.

In these cases, leadership isn’t deciding whether transparency is good, they’re deciding when transparency becomes possible.

In business, timing matters as much as truth.

The Real Question: What Does “Full Disclosure” Actually Mean?

In the discussion, a more nuanced idea emerges:

Full disclosure doesn’t mean sharing everything with everyone immediately. It means sharing the right information with the right stakeholders at the right time. That’s where leadership judgment comes in.

Project professionals often find themselves navigating gray areas between transparency, trust, and strategic confidentiality.

A Final Thought

In the closing remarks, one example stands out: sandbagging.

* A team member thinks a task will take two hours, but to avoid risk, they say one day.

* The manager reports one week.

* Leadership tells the board one year.

This exaggeration illustrates what happens when trust disappears. When people don’t feel safe sharing the truth, the entire system distorts reality. Once that happens, no project plan can save you.

The Debate Continues

So here’s the question for you:

Should project teams always receive full disclosure?

Or is selective transparency sometimes the smarter leadership choice?

Reply and share your perspective. The best insights often come from the debate.

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A few years ago we tackled a question that feels even more relevant today:

Is social media amplifying confirmation bias inside organizations, and quietly increasing project risk?

At the time, platforms were being criticized for algorithm-driven echo chambers. The idea was simple:

You like something → you see more of it.You agree with something → it gets reinforced.You never get challenged → your worldview hardens.

Sound familiar?

The Core Debate

The argument for the motion:

* Confirmation bias affects hiring, promotion, innovation, and team composition.

* Algorithms amplify what we already believe.

* Less exposure to diverse thinking = higher project risk.

* If your team looks and thinks like you, you may build something perfect… for yourselves.

The argument against the motion:

* Confirmation bias existed long before social media.

* It’s rooted in background, exposure, and human psychology.

* Real change happens through lived interaction, not feeds.

* Social media may enable bias, but it didn’t invent it.

Two sides with one uncomfortable truth: Confirmation bias is real, and in projects, it’s dangerous.

Why This Still Matters in 2026

Look around.

* Teams cluster around shared thinking.

* Leaders seek validation instead of challenge.

* Escalations get framed to confirm the preferred narrative.

* “Data” gets interpreted to support the already-made decision.

Ultimately the project suffers quietly.

Innovation dies in echo chambers, risk hides in blind spots, and dissent gets labeled as resistance.

The real question isn’t whether social media causes confirmation bias but rather:

What are you doing as a leader to counter it?

3 Questions for Today’s PM Leaders

* Do you actively invite opposing viewpoints, or just tolerate them?

* Does your hiring pattern expand diversity of thought, or replicate yourself?

* When new evidence challenges your plan, do you lean in, or double down?

Confirmation bias isn’t just a societal issue. It’s a governance issue, a culture issue, and a leadership issue.

If we don’t manage it deliberately, it becomes a hidden risk on every transformation.

🎧 This week’s Throwback Thursday episode is live.

Give it a listen and tell me:

Has confirmation bias gotten worse or are we just more aware of it?

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Are lessons learned actually… learned?

Back in 2017, on the PM Debate Podcast, we tackled a question that still makes people uncomfortable:

“Documenting lessons learned on projects is a waste of time.”

At the time, it felt provocative and eight years later it feels current.

In this episode, Mary Elizabeth and I took opposite sides of the argument.

I argued for the motion, not because lessons don’t matter, but because most organizations confuse documentation with learning. We create reports, archive them, check the box… and then launch the next project as if none of it ever happened.

Mary Elizabeth argued against the motion, rightly pointing out that lessons learned do matter when they’re accessible, contextual, and built into how projects actually start, plan, and execute.

Here’s where we landed:

📌 The biggest failure isn’t that we don’t capture lessons learned📌 It’s that organizations aren’t designed to use them

People move on, teams dissolve, context disappears, and leadership often already knows the risks, but chooses to proceed anyway.

One of the stories I share in this episode still sticks with me:A project that failed repeatedly over 15 years… with the same scope, same structure, and many of the same people involved. The lessons were written down, management just didn’t listen.

So maybe the real question isn’t when we document lessons learned.

Maybe it’s:

* Who is accountable for acting on them?

* Where do they show up in decision-making?

* And what happens when they’re ignored?

🎧 Throwback episodes like this remind me that tools haven’t failed us. behavior has.

Curious where you land on this debate today?I’d love to hear it.

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Corporate politics is a game every PM must play…. Or is it?

This throwback episode of the PM Debate Podcast goes straight at a question most project managers quietly wrestle with, but rarely say out loud:

Should project managers play corporate politics… or stay out of it entirely?

In this debate, Mary Elizabeth and I take opposing sides.

One argument says politics are unavoidable.If you influence without authority, you’re already in the game.You might as well learn how to play it well for the benefit of the project.

The other argument says politics are pure risk.They serve egos, not outcomes.The moment a project manager gets pulled in, the project starts paying the price.

What makes this episode timeless is that both positions are uncomfortable and both are real.

Projects don’t exist in org charts, they exist in human systems that are messy.

This isn’t a “how-to” episode, it’s a think-it-through episode.

Reflection question:Have you seen a project succeed because someone navigated politics well or despite it

Drop your take in the comments. I’m genuinely curious.

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Can the PMO be both cop and advocate?

This week’s Thursday Throwback takes us back to an old PM Debate Podcast episode with a question that still makes people uncomfortable:

Can the PMO enforce standards and still be a trusted partner to the business?

On one side: If the PMO is auditing projects, enforcing compliance, and reporting up, how can teams ever see it as an ally?

On the other: If the PMO doesn’t have skin in the game, if it only reports from the sidelines, what value is it really adding?

The debate wasn’t really about structure, it was about trust, value, and culture.

Years later, I’m convinced this tension never fully goes away. The best PMOs don’t “solve” it, they manage it deliberately, by focusing less on policing behavior and more on helping teams win.

Worth revisiting, still relevant, and still debated.

👉 Listen to the throwback episode and decide where you land.

Can a PMO be both, or does trying to be everything risk becoming nothing?

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Back in 2017, on Episode 29 of the PM Debate Podcast, we took on a question that was already gaining momentum at the time:

Is freelance project management just a passing fad, or is it the future of the profession?

On one side, the argument was clear: globalization, offshoring, and project-based work were pushing organizations toward short-term, specialized talent. For project managers, that meant more autonomy, but also more responsibility for their own careers, finances, and long-term stability.

On the other side, we challenged the assumption that freelancing is inevitable. Hidden costs, loss of institutional knowledge, confidentiality risks, and the very human desire for stability all complicate the picture. Not every organization or every professional thrives in a fully freelance model.

What makes this episode worth revisiting nearly a decade later is how unfinished the debate still is. The job market may look different today, but the core tension hasn’t gone away: Who carries the risk: the organization, or the individual?

Listen to the episode and decide for yourself whether the profession has proven this was a trend… or whether the jury is still out.

As always, I’m curious: Has your own career moved closer to one side of this debate since 2017 or further away?

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We love shortcuts, especially when hiring feels risky, messy, and expensive. So we lean on certifications, not as inputs, but as answers.

This episode of the PM Debate Podcast takes on a belief that still shapes hiring decisions every day: that certification equals competence.

What makes this debate interesting isn’t the conclusion, it’s the actual arguement.

On one side:Certifications are knowledge checks, useful, even if incomplete. They can’t tell you how someone behaves when things go sideways.

On the other:Certifications were never meant to predict success. They were meant to establish a baseline, and the failure is in how we misuse them.

Here’s the bottom line: Most organizations don’t actually know how to assess competence.

Hiring managers often default to proxies.

This conversation is a reminder that real capability shows up in judgment, context, and execution, none of which fit neatly on a resume.

🎧 Listen to Episode 28 if you want a sharper lens on:

* Hiring risk vs. hiring comfort

* Why project failure gets oversimplified

* What competence really looks like in practice

Question to listeners:What’s the most misleading signal you’ve seen used to judge a project manager?

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Trust is easy to talk about but it is much harder to define and even harder to decide what actually earns it.

In this throwback episode of the PM Debate Podcast, we revisited a deceptively simple motion:

Competence is more important than loyalty when it comes to trusting team members.

On the surface, it sounds academic but in practice, it’s deeply personal and operationally dangerous to get wrong.

On one side of the debate:

* Competence creates predictability.

* Predictability creates trust.

* If someone can’t deliver, no amount of good intent saves the team downstream.

On the other:

* Competence can be taught.

* Loyalty can’t.

* A disloyal team member doesn’t just fail, they choose to break trust.

The discussion quickly moved beyond theory into the real questions leaders face:

* Would you rather manage underperformance or disloyalty?

* Is loyalty to the organization different from loyalty to a leader?

* Is trust built through results… or relationships?

* Is it fair to expect both?

What makes this episode endure isn’t the answer, it’s the tension. Every hiring decision, every promotion, and every team reset forces leaders to weigh these two forces, often with incomplete information.

🎧 Listen to the episode and join the debate.

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