A search for a PM Heroes story began with a random page about János Kender, a Hungarian photographer. Following his work with Harry Shunk led to Pier 18, a run-down waterfront site in Lower Manhattan where curator Willoughby Sharp commissioned 27 artists to make performances in 1971. The site couldn’t accommodate viewers, so Shunk and Kender’s photographs became the public’s way of encountering the performances.
That suggests a project question: when people can only know something through its record, who decides what the record must show? Following that question gives the search a direction and something to test against the sources.
Begin somewhere that can surprise you
Start with today’s news and look for an event involving a promise, a dependency or a change affecting someone. A diary offers another route through a missed handover, an unexpected workaround or a decision that felt harder than it should. Or use WikiRoulette to open a random Wikipedia page, follow a concrete detail and refresh if no plausible project question emerges.
An inquiry, a form, a rota or an unanswered question from an earlier post can provide a starting point too. A keyword search begins with wording you’ve already chosen. These routes leave room for a subject you wouldn’t have thought to search for.
Each starting point needs a different check. Breaking news may arrive before there’s enough evidence to explain what happened. A diary can establish an experience without showing how widespread it is, while an inquiry answers questions within its particular remit. Wikipedia can introduce a person or a trail worth following, but the article’s factual claims still need checking against better sources.
Follow the detail, then change the question
For this post, WikiRoulette produced Kender’s page. MoMA’s account of Shunk-Kender describes photographers who sometimes documented performances and sometimes collaborated in making artworks. The Met’s account of Pier 18 explains Sharp’s commission and why the performances reached viewers through photographs. Together, those accounts establish the audience constraint, but leave the budget, schedule and detailed instructions unanswered.
The trail also reaches Yves Klein’s Leap into the Void. The Met describes how Klein hired Shunk and Kender to recreate a jump while friends held a safety tarpaulin. Two negatives were printed together to produce the image, which Klein distributed in a mock newspaper at Paris newsstands. MoMA credits the photomontage to Shunk-Kender.
Here the final photograph shows a leap without the protection used in making it. That creates another question about the relationship between an event and its record, supported by documented decisions about staging and distribution. The museum accounts still leave the approvals and day-to-day arrangements unexplained.
The connection to project management comes from examining those decisions. At Pier 18, the audience couldn’t attend, so the photographs had to provide their encounter with the performances. That gives you something specific to investigate: how were the photographs commissioned, made and presented when they were the audience’s only route to the event?
Check whether the answer would be new
A fresh setting can lead to an answer you’ve already published. The Crossrail post asks whether a plan describes a credible route to completion, examining an aspirational schedule that gave a poor account of the tasks remaining.
The Pier 18 lead concerns a record deliberately made for an audience that couldn’t attend. The Klein lead concerns a constructed image that differs from the event as staged. Both involve representations, but each needs to produce a distinct argument if it’s to justify another article.
Check what the sources can establish and what the reader could use. The museum accounts explain why photographs were central to Pier 18 and how Klein’s image was made and circulated. Turning either into advice about planning a project requires further evidence and reasoning.
For Pier 18, records of Sharp’s commission, the artists’ instructions and the photographs’ first presentation would help test the proposed question. If those records can’t answer it, narrow the question or set the lead aside until better evidence appears.
Give each lead a decision
Keep a short note recording where the lead began, the detail that caught your attention and the decision you want to investigate. Add the strongest source found, the nearest existing PM Heroes answer and the evidence still needed. That gives you enough to decide whether to begin research, return when more evidence appears or reject a connection that’s too thin or repeats another post.
With a random page, refresh when the trail offers no decision worth examining or no credible source to pursue. Stop when one lead has a question you can test and a plausible route to evidence, or when the time you set aside for searching is up.