Each row of your project plan is a cartoon, a hieroglyph representing a virtual state you set as an attractor. It stares back at out at you from a two dimensional plane that doesn’t really even materially exist, but is a projection you use to externalize your internal hallucinations built around your understanding of an outcome that has become attached to you. You know you need to attach behavior to it as well, some set of meaningful actions that attempt to accomplish something that is part of a bigger something, whether it’s ship building, restoring a masterpiece, or extending the functionality of software.
Each line of the imaginary grid is actually a circle, or rather an ellipse that feeds back upon itself. You assign it to someone, or some part of it to someone. A BA, who will define the development that needs to be done, a developer who will trace the definition into code that will behave in a specific way. You keep revisiting, cycling around to check on the status. The BA will return again and again to the same sets of symbology, to see how it is shaping up, the developer too, will code and test, and check with the BA, who will check back with the client, to see if the understanding of the requirement is on target.
But nothing ever goes as planned. Some other row on the plan erupts, perhaps something you thought accomplished weeks ago turns out to be undone, done incorrectly, or not to the subjective understanding of the client, a rift of subjective understanding two or more parties that creates a conflict with the way current work is progressing. You had it all imagined in detail before you had begun, in its palatial totality, whatever the work was supposed to be, the pile of rows and the way they were to bleed into each other and construct a whole.
You need to readjust, go back to your pile of rows and recolor them, make them mean different things, ever so slightly. Some are tenser than others, attracting attention from management, going from green to yellow to red. You feign control, but really, you have none. Someone is sick today, and someone has gone on vacation or has taken a new job. Information or knowledge has disappeared, either temporarily or permanently, and you can’t do it yourself, as you have enough to do just to keep the rows in order. You get on the telephone to talk to a number of specialists, each of whom has another piece of the puzzle, but not every piece, not enough pieces to form an image. You have a blur. The great hall and its byways have become a madhouse, full of off-kilter braces and columns, fully equipped with its own wrecking ball and demolition materials.
But you thrive in this environment. You love it just because nothing fits neatly and you can see it through even though it is too big, too dark to see, too kaleidoscopic and ever-shifting to grapple with, because something in you knows what to do. Even though the Whole System confounds you, you embrace it, dance with it, and it dances with you. You know what to do, even though what you do is nowhere on the project plan. It flashes out of you like light in a generator. Because amid all the whorls of chaos that storm around, you are chaos as well. You are a Chaosophist.