CASE 03 · WHAT YOU LEAVE OUT
Designing a short postgraduate course from nothing shows that the hardest part of explaining complexity is not what you include — it is the discipline to leave things out.
Designing a short postgraduate course from nothing: the hardest part of explaining complexity is the discipline to leave things out.
The situation in brief.
Higher education
Master’s programme, second year
Eight hours, no existing syllabus
The setting was a postgraduate programme at a European university. A new course in project management for second-year Master’s students had to be designed and taught with no existing syllabus to inherit. The subject — funding programmes, consortium structures, budgets, work packages, governance and the institutional machinery behind them — could easily have filled a semester. The time available was eight hours.
The obvious temptation, when a subject is well known, is to demonstrate that knowledge by transferring as much of it as possible. The slides multiply, the terminology sharpens, the students take diligent notes, and everyone leaves having covered a great deal of material.
Covering something and understanding it are not the same thing, and understanding something and being able to use it are further apart again. So the question changed: not what could be taught about the subject in eight hours, but what would help students begin to think like project managers.
That reframing changed the course. The landscape still had to be given — the funding environment and the basic architecture — but it could not be the whole of it. At some point students needed to stop listening to an explanation of project management and start doing it.
The course used two entirely ordinary tools, neither of them proprietary: a blank Gantt chart and a risk register. What mattered was what happens when someone has to build one from nothing.
It forces real questions: what are we delivering, what has to happen first, what depends on what, where does a slip cost most. A project becomes a system of dependencies.
The reverse exercise: instead of looking only at what you want to happen, ask seriously what might happen instead, and what would be done about it.
For students used to defined assignments with a correct answer waiting somewhere, building from nothing is unfamiliar — and useful.
Groups worked through a case themselves, made assumptions explicit and reached a defensible decision with incomplete information. Different groups organised the same material differently, which was the point.
The feedback was excellent, and at the time that read as confirmation that the teaching approach had worked. Looking back, it points to something else. The real challenge was not compressing a complex subject into eight hours. It was deciding what mattered enough to survive the constraint — a very different problem, and one that appears everywhere in organisations.
Complexity’s natural response inside a business is to add information: another policy, another spreadsheet, another dashboard, another hundred-page document explaining how the system works. Eventually the organisation has communicated an enormous amount and created remarkably little understanding.
A governance structure can define responsibilities, committees and escalation routes with total precision on paper and still fail, because none of that mechanism governs anything by itself. People do — and people can complete a template without understanding the decision behind it, or follow every reporting requirement and still miss the one thing that actually mattered.
Simplifying complexity is not the same as making something simplistic. The job is not removing complexity that genuinely exists — it is helping people identify what, inside that complexity, they actually need to think about.
Years of experience cannot be handed over in eight hours. What can be offered is a situation, two ordinary tools, and the responsibility to decide. What survived the constraint mattered more than everything that was left out.
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