ABSTRACT
Projects are human social endeavours, and are always complex, ambiguous and uncertain: at the granular level of individuals and their personal actions and interactions, at the intermediate level of group and inter-group behaviours, and at the social–political level of organizations and their competing interests. The complexity of work is also evident at a macroscopic level, in terms of the interactions between different organizations and parties and their diverse interests and agenda. There are, in the literature, theories about complexity, both in the world in general and as applied to organizational life. For most people, working life is characterized by the struggle between order and disorder–an existence perpetually on the edge of chaos. Complexity that appears to be structured, and hence controllable, is preferable to chaos. For individuals, complexity manifests itself firstly in terms of their daily experience.
