This is all well and good

[kexej28769@nongnue]

Rule 2: No one knows everything (and they shouldn't).
If you are working on a project where you have all the information, one of two things is likely:

You've really doubled down on the neuroticism we share.
You're taking this thing — you should just taiwan number data and start your own company selling beads* or something.
We can trust that our clients/bosses have more context than we do about broader projects and pressures. They may know more about broader strategies, that their boss gets stressed out whenever a particular project is mentioned , or that a colleague hasn’t announced their resignation yet. While Google Sheets are never an acceptable substitute for real communication, our clients or bosses may also have an idea of where they want the project to go that they haven’t talked about, or that we haven’t understood.

We can also trust that the people working on individual tasks have a good idea of whether things are going to be a problem - for example, if we are giving too little time to a task. We can try to be as informed as possible, but there is still a chance that they know something we don't.

Even if we disagree on what some things should be priorities or issues, having a transparent, shared plan helps us start difficult conversations with a shared understanding of what the plan is for now . The less everyone has to reprocess the information to make sense of it (see Principle 1), the more likely we are to resolve issues quickly.

A but expecting someone to absorb everything about a project is likely to have the opposite effect. We need a source of data that everyone can refer to, without cluttering our thoughts or our conversations with things that only we as project managers need to worry about.