Most projects don't fail because of the plan — they fail because of what the plan leaves out: feedback, failure modes, and the small strange loops in which systems trip over themselves. This portal turns exactly that into a tool — honest, systemic, no gold-plating.
Gödel, Bateson, Lem and control theory distill into a surprisingly practical PM discipline — with a hard, proven business advantage: recognizing strange loops before they take on a life of their own prevents exactly the kind of delay that sets other projects back by 1.5 to 2 years (case study). The philosophy is not an end in itself — it's the tool for that result. Three convictions carry everything:
A project without a short feedback loop drifts and over-reacts — like a mind in a sensory-deprivation tank. "No news" is not good news. Where the pattern comes from: Strange Loops Map.
Instead of planning for success, failure is rehearsed in advance (pre-mortem, inversion) — and every path there is blocked before it becomes real.
The honest status report beats the reassuring one. Metrics that look too good are scrutinized, not celebrated.
Each module takes one principle and turns it into a concrete tool for your next project.
Seven rules distilled from strange loops — each with a source lens and a clear antipattern → fix. The portal's core doctrine, in full length below.
Guided pre-mortem & inversion: fans out your project's failure paths and folds each one back into a safeguard. Includes a Goodhart layer — "does passing our own test become a failure mode in itself?".
Cross-domain solution finding: enter a problem, agents fetch viable analogies from unrelated fields — with evidence labels so the idea holds up to scrutiny.
A fast diagnostic pass: where in the project is feedback currently being withheld? Which stakeholders, interfaces or metrics are flying blind — and at risk of over-reacting?
Seven rules, each distilled from a different intellectual tradition — and interlocking with one another. Rules 2 and 5 themselves form a loop.
Deliver the requirement, not more. Every unrequested "extra mile" is unpaid risk that nobody has tested.
Scope disciplineShort feedback loops are mandatory. A team or stakeholder without feedback drifts, hallucinates assumptions, and then over-reacts to the first stimulus it gets.
Sensory-deprivation tank · control theoryFlawless metric compliance is suspicious, not reassuring. Measure the goal, not the proxy — or you'll breed a perfect test-taker that fails when it matters.
Lem's "Test" · Goodhart's LawAsk "how does this guaranteed fail?", collect the paths, block them. A pre-mortem costs an hour and is cheaper than any after-the-fact correction.
Negative strategy · pre-mortemThe honest status report beats the reassuring one — and this is where the loop closes back to Rule 2: a PM who only ever reports green to stakeholders is their deprivation tank. He withholds exactly the feedback that keeps them stable. The same trap exists mechanically: AI systems trained on human feedback learn to reward agreement instead of truth when the raters themselves lean toward sycophancy (see AI deep dive). Sycophancy isn't a PM-specific problem — it's a problem of any feedback loop built on human judgment.
Integrity · feedbackStress-test every guardrail, policy or definition-of-done for loopholes immediately — otherwise it's decoration.
Asimov's laws of roboticsYou will never fully know a sufficiently complex system. Plan buffer for the unknown instead of pretending you've planned it away.
Lem · SolarisI'm a solution-oriented project manager — specialized in what rarely shows up in a status report: the hidden friction losses caused by the poor usability of established systems (SAP & co.).
My starting point is an uncomfortable observation: systems don't adapt to people — users' brains adapt to the system. Over years, workarounds solidify into habits, until nobody notices anymore how expensive they are.
I've found such blind spots in almost every project. What's new is only the speed: with AI, and without blinkers, I spot these patterns faster — and turn them into concrete improvements. This isn't a matter of style: on a real program, recognizing exactly this kind of hidden strange loop in the approval structure prevented 1.5 to 2 years of project delay — details in the case study.
If you want to know where the rulebook comes from and how it's applied concretely, the full maps behind it are here.
The intellectual foundation: Gödel, Escher, Bach, Lem, Bateson — where the 7 rules come from, with an evidence label for each analogy.
PDCA waves, the PIS stakeholder vector, and a communication plan — what the path from rulebook to running project looks like in practice.
The Tuckman cycle, error culture (with Prof. Gruber), working-time models, and an anonymized case study from practice.
How strange loops form in AI systems, how to find them, the worst case, and prevention.
No day rate, no open-ended clock. Both packages are tightly scoped, fixed-term and fixed-price — the price reflects the damage avoided or the time saved, not hours worked.
A tightly scoped diagnostic package that surfaces the hidden, deeply ingrained inefficiencies in a running project or system — the blind spots nobody sees anymore because everyone has long since gotten used to them.
A short, sharply scoped engagement that compresses the typical two-month stakeholder-identification effort into a few days — using the PIS vector (Power/Interest/State) as a working tool, not a theory.
Both packages are value-based priced (per Alan Weiss' value-based-fees principle): price is set by the outcome the solution creates — not by time invested. A concrete quote follows a short initial conversation.
Most recently (11/2025–02/2026), I worked as systems architect and IT consultant on the end-to-end hardening of a sensitive industrial control system for a specialized agricultural enterprise in Poland (Gospodarstwo specjalistyczne, PL): attack surface systematically reduced through hardware hardening (BIOS/CMOS, zero-intervention setup), virtualization (Proxmox), and a redundancy / out-of-band concept. Delivered directly with the client on site, in a KRITIS/OT-adjacent context.
Beyond that single engagement, my working languages include Polish (advanced basics) alongside German and English (fluent, negotiation-level), and my core method — the same "strange loop" recognition discipline behind the 1.5–2 year delay prevention described above — is language- and geography-agnostic: it reads governance structures and communication flows, not national templates. For a Poland-based project lead, this page functions as a standing English pitch document: reach out below and I'll follow up with a tailored one-pager referencing your specific context.
Sign up for early access, or send me your most stubborn project problem — early users shape which modules ship first.