Keep It Simple: Steps Without Principles Are a Cargo Cult

Dmitry Ilyenkov, known to Alexander for six years from TeamLead Conf, founded PM Club, an online school for project and product managers with, by his account, over 30,000 students. Fifteen-plus years in project management as practitioner and lecturer, and a past president of the Moscow PMI chapter. He first tried a business novel in the vein of Goldratt and The Phoenix Project, spent a year on it and gave up: instead of Bukowski his text kept producing sparkling snow and an unexpected phone call. The second attempt was straight non-fiction, written with his wife Lera. Alexander compared the result to a well-known Russian guide to plain writing; Dmitry replies that nothing here is accidental — the book's commissioning editor presents herself as the only person Ilyahov lets edit his own books. Alexander is for plain explanation too: his book club grew out of short retellings written because nobody read what he recommended, and his 168 hours a week do not stretch. Dmitry picks up Hawking, whose editor told him every formula halves the number of readers.

Alexander — a certified PMP, by his memory since 2018, who also studied IPMA — asks why the focus shifted. Dmitry met Frank Turley at a PMI conference in Berlin, and Turley introduced him to Nader Rad, by Dmitry's recollection one of the roughly seven-person core team of the seventh PMBOK. He loves PMBOK and cannot stand the hate it gets: it is an encyclopedia rather than a methodology, not obliged to say what to do tomorrow — people are the ones who do the work. P3.express is the opposite, step by step: 33 steps, seven lifecycle stages, an instruction sheet like the one in a LEGO box. A confession follows: the 3,000-piece space station he assembled recently does not rotate, because near the start he was a couple of pieces off, and he dreads taking it apart. Asked whether the book could be for P3.express what Rita's book was for PMBOK, Dmitry laughs it off — let us see in a few years — and recommends the Oxford professor Bent Flyvbjerg, who analysed 16,000 megaprojects and, it seems, used not one professional term.

Alexander sees in the approach a framework for a beginner: a predictable result before the manual has been read. Dmitry agrees but has not settled for himself whether to position the method that way: people who passed the PMP long ago roll it out not to one team but to many. He recalls Roma Ivleev in a bar after the TeamLead conference: everyone wants complicated things — have you already done all the simple ones? At conferences everybody has detailed Gantt charts, while inside a company of 40,000 employees you hear "we have no project charter, we are a startup"; that is not a startup, that is chaos. The principles grew out of a question Dmitry put to Nader Rad: without them the steps turn into cargo cult. Alexander recalls that Feynman called this worship of form, and tells the joke about the turkey whose legs get chopped off because grandmother's pot was small.

The first and hardest principle is to choose true results over attachments; in the book that is the Hungarian doctor Semmelweis, who was not believed about washing hands before surgery. Alexander adds a story Dmitry finds more frightening than his own, because it happened in their lifetimes: the 2005 Nobel Prize in medicine was awarded for the bacterium that causes ulcers, while the discovery itself dates to 1982 — decades of denial in between, which brings up Thomas Kuhn and scientific change arriving with new generations. The second principle is to protect energy: every fifth road accident, the book says, is down to a tired driver, and a tired brain turns its biases up and follows yesterday's pattern. Alexander puts it in model terms: a considered decision is a heavy model with plenty of inference compute, while on empty you throttle and answer on instinct — which is why he moves hard conversations to the morning.

The third principle, always be proactive, gets confused with fuss: it means the navigator even on a familiar route, the agenda sent before the meeting, and risks weighed before the start — not pride in having no project documentation. Alexander teaches his son at chess to move to the opponent's side and count the pieces; Dmitry recalls the sports school where by the third rank you had to think three moves ahead — possibly the best lesson of his life. The fourth is about the strength of a chain. Alexander brings a puzzle he wanted to add to SRE screening: a garland of ten bulbs in series, each with a 10% chance of failing over a year, works only if every one survives, so 0.9 to the tenth is about 0.35 — roughly a 65% chance the garland stays dark; the nines in a microservice chain multiply the same way. Dmitry adds that the weak link shifts as soon as you work on it, and that people look for keys under the streetlight. An example from his student, who ran a project office: in a logistics hub, no number of workers will take a pallet down from ten metres without a reach truck.

The fifth principle is to do nothing without a clear goal: "let us ship this feature" and "a user asked for it" are poor justifications, and the question of what a thing will actually bring he borrows from the film Revolver. Which projects to do matters more than how, and not everything should be quantified — Goodhart in 1975 and the sociologist Campbell a year later described what happens to a measure that becomes a target. The sixth principle, reproducible elements, is the cheapest: checklists, which had a surgeon ask name and age and discover he had come to operate on a different person, plus cycles with planning and closing; Alexander extends it to immutable infrastructure and reproducible builds. The book itself was run as a project: charter, backlog, an MVP in a month, half the text deleted the last night, 61 cover options — 122 with the dust jacket — and the title and subtitle swapped round.