Working papers

Nobody Stands Outside

Reframing how we think about management

Terry Cooke-Davies. Working paper. Third draft, 6 November 2026. Comments and disagreement welcome.

1. Something every manager has seen

Most people who have worked on projects have seen some version of this. A programme reports that it is on track. The milestones are green. The board is satisfied. Meanwhile the people whose work the programme was meant to change are doing much what they did before. Nobody has lied. The reports are accurate about what they measure. But what they measure is the progress of the plan, and the plan has quietly taken the place of the change it was meant to bring about.

In 2003 I listed this among the problems general managers had identified with change projects: measuring the progress of the plan rather than the change accomplished (Cooke-Davies 2003). I had met it long before I had a name for it. In 1985 my colleagues and I trained every project manager in a client organisation to use a new project management toolkit. Each left the course with a fully documented plan for a live project, and the client regarded the programme as a great success. When I looked at project performance some time later, I could see no appreciable improvement (Cooke-Davies 1990). The training was a success on paper because the paper was what was being looked at.

These are small examples. I want to suggest that they share a shape with something much larger, and that seeing the shape changes how we might think about management.

2. Naming it

In the 1930s Edmund Husserl described what he called a surreptitious substitution. Galileo and those who followed him built a mathematical picture of nature, abstracted from the world of everyday experience. Over time the picture was quietly put in place of the world it had been drawn from, until the abstraction was taken to be what is really there and lived experience was treated as a mere appearance of it (Husserl 1970). Alfred North Whitehead described the same error from another side. He called it the fallacy of misplaced concreteness: treating an abstraction as though it were the concrete thing (Whitehead 1925). More recently Adam Frank, Marcelo Gleiser and Evan Thompson have called the result the blind spot of science: the habit of forgetting that every scientific picture is made by people, from within experience, and depends on it (Frank, Gleiser and Thompson 2024).

The plan reported as the change is the same substitution on a small scale. A plan is an abstraction from the work, made for good reasons. The trouble starts when it is taken for the work.

There is a reason the substitution is so easy to make. To treat the plan as the project, the planner has to assume a position outside the project, from which the whole can be seen and the plan checked against it. The same assumption lies behind the older scientific picture, in which the observer stands outside nature and describes it as it is, independent of anyone looking. The argument of this essay is that nobody has that position. We are always participants.

3. What we can and cannot stand outside

This needs stating carefully, because it is easy to overstate. We can stand outside some things. I can take an outside view of a bridge, a budget or another person. I can also stand back from things I have made in imagination, such as a plan, a model or a story, and examine them. What I cannot do is stand outside the whole that includes me. There is no position from which I can see the world with myself left out of it.

Nor does a plan answer for anything. People act. The world responds. And the response lands where it lands: sometimes on the person who acted, often on other people and other things (Cooke-Davies 2026b). The one who acts starts the consequences, but the world shapes them, which is why they so often surprise us. That is the sense in which I have said that reality is what answers (Cooke-Davies 2026c). The substitution happens when the person who acts treats the plan as the reality, so that what comes back does not change it.

4. Others who have come to the same place

I am not the first to reach this conclusion, and the routes others have taken are worth noticing.

Evan Thompson, in Mind in Life, approaches it from biology. A living thing does not sit apart from its surroundings, observing them. It makes its way among them, and what it knows is bound up with how it lives (Thompson 2007). Carlo Rovelli approaches it from physics. On his reading, relativity and quantum theory show that there is no view from nowhere: the properties of things are relations, and we never leave the circle of perspectives (Rovelli 2026). Whitehead, a century ago, refused to split the world into nature as science describes it and nature as we experience it (Whitehead 1920). That refusal matters here, because it keeps cultural, biological and physical change in one continuous world rather than two.

Management thought has come close too. Ralph Stacey spent many years arguing that executives do not choose an organisation’s direction from outside it, but take part in the local interactions from which patterns emerge. He subtitles the first chapter of one of his books “Experiencing the reality of uncertainty but still believing that executives choose an organization’s ‘direction’” (Stacey 2010). But Stacey frames his case mainly as an argument about complexity: the organisation is too complex to be controlled. I think the problem lies deeper. It is not only that the whole is too complex to see from outside. It is that there is no outside to see it from.

Readers who know the American pragmatists will recognise another lineage. John Dewey criticised what he called the spectator theory of knowledge, the idea that we come to know the world by looking at it from outside (Dewey 1929). This essay owes something to that tradition, and I would rather say so than have it pointed out.

5. Management is making arrangements

What used to be called administration, and is now called management, is mostly the making of arrangements: who does what, who decides, who is told, who checks, and who receives what comes back. Geoffrey Vickers, who spent much of his working life in administration before he wrote about it, described the work as regulation: keeping a set of relationships within acceptable bounds over time (Vickers 1972). He did not imagine the administrator standing outside the system. He wrote from inside it.

Managers do not make arrangements and then step back. They make them while living inside the arrangements they made before, and those earlier arrangements shape what they are able to notice. So management is the making and remaking of arrangements from within.

That gives a practical question, which is at the core of what I have called answerable realism. When what this arrangement sets going lands on someone else, how will it find its way back to someone who can respond? An arrangement with no answer to that question will go on reporting success while its consequences accumulate elsewhere. That was the position revealed by research on project sponsorship I reported in 2005. Only 7 per cent of projects delivered all the benefits expected of them, and a quarter could not say what benefits had been delivered at all. Yet sponsors were not especially dissatisfied (Cooke-Davies 2005). The consequences existed. The arrangements did not bring them back.

6. The reflex to override

When the consequences of what we do travel far and arrive late, a natural response is to look for someone who can stand above the whole arrangement and hold everyone to account: a stronger regulator, a higher authority, an overseer with the power to apportion accountability. It is an understandable hope. I think it repeats the problem it is meant to solve.

In a paper presented at the EURAM conference in Kristiansand in June 2026, I called the underlying pattern the consciousness trap: the habit of privileging symbolic intelligence, the plans, models and frameworks we make, over the regulatory intelligence already at work in the relationships a project touches (Cooke-Davies 2026a). One feature of the trap matters here. It captures its own critique. When we recognise that override has failed, we tend to respond with more override: better frameworks, stronger controls, more central authority.

The paper used a recent example. In November 2025 the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Project Delivery reported on the delivery of UK infrastructure projects (APPG 2025). Its diagnosis was largely accurate: political interference, inadequate early engagement, failure to learn from past mistakes, and damaged relationships with affected communities. Yet its recommendations intensified central control: independent assurance before announcement, mandatory training for senior civil servants, accountable chief project officers, and stronger oversight bodies. Even the affected communities appeared mainly as a source of opposition to be managed.

An overseer standing above the arrangement is the same move made one level higher. It assumes a position outside, from which the whole can be seen and corrected, and nobody has that position. I do not claim that oversight is useless. Auditors, courts and inspectors often do useful work. But when they do, it is because they too are participants, whose own judgements remain open to correction. What fails is regulation from a position that is not itself answerable.

The alternative the paper proposed was governance by recognition: attending to the intelligence already distributed through the system rather than overriding it. The perceptions of stakeholders become a form of sensing, not obstacles. Local knowledge becomes evidence, not anecdote. The sponsor becomes a holder of patterns, attending to what the project does to the systems it touches as well as to what it delivers. Heathrow’s Terminal 5 gave a precise illustration. During construction, the client held risk centrally and treated signals from the front line as intelligence, and the building was completed ahead of schedule and within budget. At the opening, attention was organised around the public launch, and concerns raised by staff during trials went unheard. On the first day the baggage system did exactly what it had been designed to do, and stopped (Brady and Davies 2010).

Elinor Ostrom found something similar on a much larger scale. Studying fisheries, forests and irrigation systems in many parts of the world, she showed that communities often govern shared resources well without either an external authority or private ownership (Ostrom 1990). The arrangements that lasted shared certain features. The people affected by the rules took part in making them. Those who monitored were users themselves, or answerable to users. Sanctions started small. There were local places to settle disputes. These are, in effect, routes by which consequences come back to people with standing to respond.

Ostrom’s work also shows where such arrangements run out. They work where those who bear the consequences can take part. Many consequences of projects land where that is not possible: on future people, on the natural world, on communities with no voice in the decision. That is where the hardest work of responsible management lies, and I do not pretend to have solved it.

7. Why this need not overwhelm

Faced with consequences that travel so far and arrive so late, it is easy to feel that staying answerable for them is beyond anyone. I think that feeling is itself a symptom of the outside view. It comes from imagining that someone has to be responsible for the whole, and then asking who could possibly carry that. And because the trap captures its own critique, the usual response to the feeling is to build a larger framework, which only makes the task larger.

Nobody holds the whole, because nobody stands outside it. Each participant is answerable for what they touch, and what each of us can touch is bounded by what our situation affords: our role, our resources, our relationships, what has already happened. Arrangements connect those reaches, so that what lands on others can find its way back. Ostrom called this polycentric governance: many centres of decision, nested within one another, with none standing over all the rest (Ostrom 2010). She also warned against treating any set of design principles as a panacea (Ostrom, Janssen and Anderies 2007). No procedure will do this for us.

What it asks of people cannot be reduced to procedure either. In the Kristiansand paper I argued that it depends on a capacity for attention formed through experience (Cooke-Davies 2026a). The project leader who senses that a delayed task signals something deeper than schedule variance has not learned that on a training course. They have learned it through years of attending, making mistakes and bearing the consequences. The German tradition called such formation Bildung. It cannot be mandated, but organisations can make room for it: by valuing what sustains a system as well as what it delivers, by extending time horizons beyond project closure, and by allowing slowness when it is needed.

This is a way of simplifying that is not reductionist. Reductionism simplifies the world, cutting it down to fit the plan. This simplifies the task. Each person keeps their own part small and their attention wide. Small means claiming to steer only what lies within their reach. Wide does not mean attending to everything, which would bring back the burden of the whole. It means staying open to what comes back from what they have touched, including from people and places they did not expect. Iain McGilchrist distinguishes narrow, grasping attention from broad, open attention, a distinction that holds whatever one makes of his account of the brain (McGilchrist 2021). And attention is not passive. What we attend to shapes what we perceive, what we perceive shapes what we do, and what we do brings new things into being. None of this requires simplifying the world, which is left as complex as it is. A cook does not need a theory of the whole meal to taste the soup, but what the cook notices decides what goes into the pot next. We do not need to understand the whole system to recognise, where we stand, that a plan has taken the place of what it was for. And we do not need a complete method, only a question we can ask of any arrangement: when this lands on someone else, how will it come back?

In 1985 I did not oversee my client’s organisation. I looked at what my own training had touched, and the culture showed itself from there.

8. Holding the claim the same way

Two questions remain. The first is whether, if nobody stands outside, we are simply carried along, our choices fixed by everything that came before. I do not think so, and the reason is the same. Determinism imagines someone standing outside time, for whom the future is already as settled as the past. The usual alternative imagines a chooser standing outside causation, deciding from nowhere. Both are outside views. What we actually have is choice from within. Each of us chooses out of our own values, relationships and circumstances. Our choices are caused, in part, by who we are and how we stand to others, and they are still ours. Looking back, what happened is fixed, but it is fixed because it happened, not because it had to. Agency is not exemption from causation. It is participation in it.

The second question is how I can make a claim about the whole if nobody stands outside it. The answer is that I hold the claim in the same way I have argued we should hold everything else: as answerable. Its test is practical. Do arrangements built on it fail less often than arrangements built on an outside view? The evidence I have gathered over thirty-five years, from the 1985 audit to the sponsorship research, is a start on that test, not the end of it. If the claim is wrong, the consequences of acting on it should show that, and I should be willing to see them.

References

APPG for Project Delivery (2025) Building a better future: inquiry into improving the delivery of national infrastructure projects. London: All-Party Parliamentary Group for Project Delivery, November 2025.

Brady, T. and Davies, A. (2010) From hero to hubris: reconsidering the project management of Heathrow’s Terminal 5. International Journal of Project Management, 28(2), 151–157.

Cooke-Davies, T. J. (1990) Changing corporate culture to improve project performance. IPMA (formerly INTERNET) Conference, Vienna.

Cooke-Davies, T. J. (2003) Do “business change” projects really change the business? PMI Global Congress Europe, The Hague, Netherlands.

Cooke-Davies, T. J. (2005) The executive sponsor – the hinge upon which organisational project management maturity turns? PMI Global Congress EMEA, Edinburgh, Scotland.

Cooke-Davies, T. J. (2026a) Beyond override: recognising distributed intelligence in project governance. Paper presented at the EURAM 2026 Conference, Kristiansand, Norway.

Cooke-Davies, T. J. (2026b) Where do consequences go? The Pond and the Pulse and insearchofwisdom.online, 21 October 2026.

Cooke-Davies, T. J. (2026c) Reality is what Answers. insearchofwisdom.online, 1 November 2026.

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