Phronetic judgement, an essential competence for a project manager in a complex project environment

In this paper, we invite the reader to rethink project management from the perspective of phrónêsis, or practical wisdom, a central notion in Aristotle's philosophy. The turn to Aristotle has been in vogue ever since Martin Heidegger (2009) pointed out the importance of phrónêsis for the humanities and philosophy. Contemporary critical project management literature argues for a rich set of reflections, ones that phrónêsis could provide. This paper is one of the first to illustrate how a reflection based on phrónêsis could inform project management practices. The illustration comes from an inquiry into the practice of the first author in his role as a senior project manager for a large infrastructural project. Reference to this paper should be made as follows: Bouwman, R. and Brohm, R. (2016) 'Phronetic judgement, an essential competence for a project manager in a complex project environment!', Int.