In Krzysztof Penderecki’s The Black Mask — an opera performed so rarely that merely mentioning it counts as an insider’s gesture — doom hangs over the stage from the very first scene. Nobody says it aloud, but the music leaves no doubt: something here is going to go wrong. Not maybe. Certainly. The only question is when. And when the moment finally comes, the whole ensemble stands there as if no one had read the score.
Projects and that opera have more in common than either side would care to admit. Because in projects, too, the question is never whether something goes wrong. The question is whether someone read the score far enough ahead to not sleep through the critical bar.
Know Only Your Next Cue, and You’ll Miss the Thunderclap
In many projects, risk management has the charm of a compulsory exercise. There is a register, usually an Excel sheet, where risks are dutifully entered — „supplier might drop out,“ „budget might run short,“ „requirements might change.“ All in the conditional, all vague, all about as threatening as a weather forecast for the day after tomorrow. I once inherited a risk register that contained exactly one risk: „unforeseen events.“ That is not risk management. That is astrology with row numbers.
Experienced project leads treat risks the way a conductor treats the score: looking ahead, with an eye on the whole and a fine sense for the places where it turns dangerous. In opera, those are the passages where singers, orchestra and stage machinery all have to land on the same point at once — one timing error, and the scene tips over. In a project, they are the dependencies, the interfaces, the moments when three teams have to deliver at the same time and none of them knows what the others are doing.
Good risk management begins with what opera calls dramatic instinct: the ability to sense tension before it discharges. In a project, that tension rarely shows up as a loud alarm. More often it is silence in meetings that used to be full of debate. CC chains that suddenly grow longer. Developers who have been fixing „just one small thing“ for three days. Read those signs, and you have time to act. Ignore them, and you get the bill — usually on the Friday evening before go-live, because problems have a sense of theatrical timing that would make even Puccini jealous.
The Whole Town Is Burning, and Nobody Said Fire
In Penderecki’s The Devils of Loudun — yes, Penderecki again, the man had a gift for catastrophe — an entire town descends into chaos because nobody names the real problem. Instead there is accusation, condemnation and burning. In the end nobody has won, but everyone has lost.
In a project the same thing happens, in civilized form. A problem surfaces, and instead of laying it calmly on the table, the great ensemble of blame strikes up: engineering points at the business side. The business side points at the vendor. The vendor points at the spec. And the spec was never read by anyone who needed to understand it anyway. The pattern is so common you could almost take it for human nature. It probably is. Doesn’t help, though.
What helps: transparency that is allowed to hurt. A problem does not belong in a quiet back room but on the stage — visible, named, with a clear statement of what happened and who is affected. Then the question no project manager likes to ask, because it gives up control: „What do we need now to solve this together?“ Not „I’ll handle it“ — because whoever solves problems alone usually solves only half and defers the rest. And sometimes what is needed is not speed but a brief stop. The grand pause in music, the silence that lets everything breathe before it moves on.
Panic Is the Worst Coloratura
Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes tells how a village destroys itself. A rumor spreads faster than any truth. The crowd loses its composure, and in the end everything plunges into ruin — not because the rumor is true, but because no one is listening anymore.
Panic is contagious in projects too, and it needs surprisingly little incubation time. A nervous comment in the status round, a mail forwarded in a hurry with a red flag, a manager who suddenly turns up in meetings she otherwise never attends — and the best team starts acting irrationally. Decisions are rushed, solutions are implemented before the problem is understood, and everyone runs without knowing where to.
In such moments an experienced project manager is like a good bass-baritone: calm in tone, grounded in posture, clear in articulation. No blazing pathos, but structure. Mistakes are named, not dramatized. Next steps are communicated, not culprits hunted. That sounds easier than it is — because project managers have a pulse too. But the difference between an amateur and a professional on stage is not that the professional feels no fear. It is that he hits his entrance anyway.
The Wrong Note That Becomes the Right Motif
In Alexander Zemlinsky’s The King Kandaules — a gloriously scandalous opera unjustly left in the shadows — a moral dilemma leads to a radical change of perspective. No happy ending, but a new truth. Sometimes it is precisely the rupture that gives a piece its depth.
Projects know this moment too. The feature that fails just before launch forces a leaner solution that turns out better than the original. The pitch that falls through makes room for a concept not born under time pressure. The bug nobody wanted to see saves the entire user experience, because it surfaces three weeks before release and not three weeks after. Not every problem is a catastrophe. Some are coloraturas that sound wrong at first and, in hindsight, were exactly right.
The prerequisite is a stance that does not treat problems as personal failure but as what they are: part of the production. There is no opera house that knows only premieres without mishaps. And no project that runs through without problems. The difference lies not in the absence of difficulty, but in what a team makes of it.
Curtain Up, Even When the Set Is Shaking
Read your risks ahead, name your problems instead of hiding them, and don’t drive your ensemble into panic — and you will experience what every good intendant knows: even when the chandelier falls, the piece goes on. Sometimes with an improvisation better than what was planned. Sometimes with a black eye and the realization that next time you fasten the chandelier more securely.
Because as in opera, what counts in the end is not that everything was perfect. What counts is that the ensemble stayed together. That the last bar still stood when the curtain came down. And that in the hall, despite everything, that brief moment of silence sets in — before someone starts to applaud.