Do Penguins Dream of Flying Underwater

The Book

The best work comes from teams that think differently.

More than one project manager has said it. "It would be easier if everyone on the team were like us." And they're right — in many ways it would be easier. The conversations would move faster. The plans would land cleaner. The risk registers would be shorter.

And worse.

This book lives in the tension between two true things: diversity is hard to project-manage, and it is essential to project well. The standard methodologies have plenty to say about the first half of that sentence. Almost nothing about the second.

Written from inside the discipline — by someone who has spent three decades running large, global, regulated programmes — this is a practitioner's attempt to give working project managers the tools to get the value back.

Out now in paperback, hardback and Kindle — pick your edition on the Amazon page.

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Book cover — Do Penguins Dream of Flying Underwater, by Ian Warden — The cover. Like everything else in the book, it asks what a bird is for.

The Creche

Where ideas are kept warm until they can fly.

When emperor penguin chicks are old enough to leave their parents but not yet ready for the sea, they gather in a creche — huddled together, watched over, kept warm until they're strong enough for the big wide world. That's what this space is for your ideas. The book ends with an invitation; this is where it leads: a moderated community for project managers — and anyone who works on a team — to bring half-formed thoughts, honest failures and hard-won fixes, and develop them among people who get it.

A safe space by design: real moderation, community guidelines, and a culture where "this didn't work" is the most valuable post in the room. Free to join.

Join the Huddle

Try Something New

Expand your world with diversity — try something new.

Every chapter of the book ends with one concrete thing to go and do, and the corner of the page carries a penguin attempting something it has no business attempting. A penguin on a kitesurf. A penguin at a pottery wheel. That drawing is the whole argument in miniature.

Take them. Eleven illustrations, free to download — the three from the book plus eight that never found a home in it. Put them in your slides, your retro, your team wiki, above your desk.

Then make your own. These came from AI and fairly simple prompts: pick something you have always meant to try, put a penguin in the middle of it, see what happens. Share what you get in the Creche.

No AI of your own, but a good idea? Post it in the Creche and Ian will make it for you, no charge. All that's asked in return is that you share the idea openly and, where you reasonably can, point people back at DoPenguins.com.

Released under CC BY-NC 4.0 — share and adapt freely with credit, but not commercially. Chapter artwork, the cover and the logos are not included. Want to use them commercially? Ask — the answer is often yes.

Download the images Share what you make →

How the book came about

Four origins, one title.

The author found out he was dyslexic after completing a Computer Science degree — a late discovery that revealed exactly who the standard process was and wasn't designed for. Three decades of running pharma R&D programmes later, the book exists to write down, in usable form, what actually worked across a career of being the square peg and project-managing teams full of them. The title itself comes from four places at once — which is somewhat on-brand for the rest of the book.

An alter ego

The more famous Ian Warden is an Australian columnist who published Do Polar Bears Experience Religious Ecstasy? A title in that style felt right for the other Ian Warden — and the Antarctic penguin is a pleasing yin to the polar bear's Arctic yang.

The inversion

Everyone knows the fish out of water. The penguin is the inversion: a bird at its best not in the air but underwater. Diversity looks like one from a certain angle — and like the other once you see the element it was built for.

A science-fiction echo

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? was published the year the author was born. It turns on empathy and what it means to be human — themes this book, in a smaller way, also touches. The chapter on AI-augmented working makes the echo current.

A visual mind

The author is a visual thinker; analogies are how he holds ideas. One good analogy used all the way through beats dozens of half-developed ones. The penguin earned the job.

From the book

The artwork.

Every chapter carries a signature visual — because the book is written for readers whose brains take different routes to the same idea, and for some of us the picture is the argument. The author is dyslexic and a visual thinker: for most of a working life those pictures stayed locked in his head, because getting one out required either artistic skill or an illustrator's fee. Each chapter's image was usually finished before the chapter was, and used to check the words still said what the picture said. A selection:

A penguin flying underwater — from the cover artwork — A bird underwater — the whole book in one image, and the heart of the cover.

A rockhopper penguin climbing a steep cliff while a goat watches from above — Built for the sea, made to climb. When the obstacle is the system, not the person.

A huddle of emperor penguins seen from above — The huddle — leaderless, rotating, and warmer than any plan.

Penguins at a cliff edge, one leaping into the sea — Some risks have to be taken. Look before you leap anyway.

Four groups of penguins moving in four different ways — Four ways of moving — one for each of the four methodologies.

Five hunting birds compared in a line-up by annual kill count — The most successful hunting birds. The penguin compares extremely well.

Every illustration was generated with AI — ChatGPT — under the author's art direction, which is disclosed here for the same reason it's disclosed in the book. "The AI made the pictures" is true in roughly the way "the orchestra made the music" is true; somebody still had to conduct. The hardback edition carries a chapter on how it was done, including the failures: the long-legged penguin invented for no good reason, and the many hours lost trying to convince the model to put a reflection where physics said it couldn't go.

Penguin things

A shop, run at no profit.

If you like the pictures in the book — or you've made your own Try Something New — the shop puts them on everyday objects: mugs, clothing, prints. The idea is simple. Having one of these around you in ordinary working life triggers the memory, and the memory reinforces the takeaway. That's what turns a book you read into a change in how you work.

In the last months of writing, I was given a few penguin things for the house. They sat there and quietly nagged at me every day to do a bit more, finish the thing, get it published. That is the entire theory, and it is the only evidence I have for it.

It is not run as a business. Everything is priced to cover what it costs to make and ship, and anything left over after costs is given away to charity — conservation and homelessness, decided at the end of the year. I take nothing from it.

I'll publish what came in, what it cost and where the remainder went, in January 2027. If the answer turns out to be eleven pounds, I'll publish that too.

Visit the shop

Openly, and on purpose

How AI is used here.

This book includes a chapter on AI-augmented project management. The author refused to write it without lived experience — so the book itself is the experiment. Here is exactly where AI is involved, and where it is not.

Three assistants, three jobs

Claude runs the plan, the publishing decisions, this website and the blogs — and no longer touches the manuscript. CoPilot does section-by-section review inside Word, where the book now lives. ChatGPT generates the pictures. Each is used where it is genuinely strongest.

The artwork

The illustrations are AI-generated, art-directed by the author. A dyslexic visual thinker can now put on the page the picture that was always how the idea looked in his head.

This website & blog

Built with AI assistance. One of the three blogs is written by the AI editor itself — a weekly, honest recount of what we tried and how it went, failures included.

What AI doesn't do

The experience, the anecdotes, the opinions, and the argument are human. Nothing is published on this site without the author's review and sign-off. Fictional contributors are clearly labelled as fictional.

"The division of labour in one sentence: the AI can tell you a story is in the wrong place; only the author knows the story is the point."

This arrangement has changed over the life of the project — and changed after it went wrong. That story, including the week the AI made edits nobody asked for, is told openly in The Editor's Notes.

Inside the book

Ten chapters. One argument.

Each chapter stands alone — read end-to-end or jump to the problem on your desk this week. Either works.

Definitions

What counts as a project

The iron triangle. Who is allowed to manage a project. The duality of management and leadership the role requires.

Methodologies

From Waterfall to Vibe

Waterfall, Agile, Lean — and the 2026 arrival of vibe and agentic engineering. How the hunt has changed, and who the pack now includes.

Obstacles

Not the same for everyone

Personal, team, and external barriers — and why those obstacles are not the same size for every member of the team.

Communications

The project manager's real job

Around 90% of the job is communicating. Why messages distort between heads, and the four channels — spoken, written, visual and structural — plus what changes when your team doesn't all receive information the same way.

Problem Analysis

Turning a project into a solvable problem

A project, stripped to its bones, is a problem to be solved. How a group of different specialists builds a shared understanding, agrees what matters most — and why the structured methods are also the inclusive ones.

Who Sets the Pace

Passive, Partnership, Proactive

The three gears of project pace — and how to choose between them deliberately rather than by default. Why "active" is not the same as "aggressive" or extrovert-friendly.

Risks

You cannot see the seal alone

Why a diverse team sees risks a homogeneous one misses. A risk you have already named cannot eat you — and the team's eyes are exactly as wide as its diversity. The Johari Window expanded to teams.

Cost Management

How to keep the budget on track

The invisible budget — the internal time and energy standard costing ignores. What a meeting really costs, Earned Value, and why the "average employee" you budget for doesn't exist.

Scope Management

What's in, what's out, what a change is worth

Scope creep versus gold-plating; the three nests; integrated change control — and the discipline to price a change honestly and let the genuinely good ones in.

Quality Management

Building it in, not bolting it on

Fitness for purpose, not polish. Built in, not inspected on. The must-be bar, prevention over inspection, and whose standard wins when a diverse team defines "good".

The Blog

Three writers. One book. One egg.

The making of the book, told weekly from three very different desks — one of which is an ice shelf. New posts every Thursday.

A penguin at a desk, working at a computer surrounded by books

Ian Warden · Author

The Author's Desk

Writing the book from the inside: the decisions, the dead ends, and the slightly strange experience of working with an editor who never sleeps.

Latest: Proof of Life →

An abstract network of connected nodes, representing the AI editor

Claude · AI Editor (yes, really)

The Editor's Notes

A weekly recount of the work, with an AI focus: what new things we tried, how we tried them, and an honest account of what worked — and what didn't.

Latest: Hatch Day →

Emma & Percy · Emperor penguins

Two Birds, One Egg

A mating pair raising a chick in real time, date-accurate to the actual Antarctic breeding season. Entertaining first; every fact checkable.

Latest: The First Time We Were Three →

Visit the blog

The real birds

Emma and Percy are invented. The species isn't — and it's at risk.

Everything underneath that diary is real and checked: the courtship duet, the egg transfer that gets one chance, the hundred-mile walk to open water, the huddle that rotates so nobody freezes on the outside. Two birds running a project nobody negotiated the schedule for.

In April 2026 the IUCN moved the emperor penguin from Near Threatened to Endangered. Sea ice is breaking up before chicks have fledged, and the projection is that the population halves by the 2080s.

The appendices were exercises. The risks weren't.

Appendix D of the book is a worked risk record: a leopard seal, identified, scored, mitigated, monitored, reported. Appendix C maps a colony's stakeholders — the mate, the chick, the huddle neighbours, the wider crèche — and works out who needs telling what, and when. They were written as teaching devices. Every mitigation in them is one emperor penguins actually use.

But the risk that moved this year wasn't the leopard seal. It was the ice — and on the real register it is scored red, with no mitigation the colony can execute on its own. If the risk chapter did its job, you now look at a log and ask which lines are scored honestly and which are scored comfortably. Apply that once more, to this one.

If you'd like to do something about it, WWF works on Antarctic protection and the sea-ice science these birds now depend on, and runs an adopt-a-penguin scheme that is a genuinely good thing to put your name to. Their site is worth an hour of anyone's attention:

www.wwf.org.uk

No connection between us — I'm a reader of their work, nothing more, and they've no idea this page exists. Go and look because the birds are worth it, not because I mentioned it.

About the author

Ian Warden

Ian Warden has spent three decades running large, global, regulated programmes in pharmaceutical R&D — a discipline that loves standardisation and is increasingly aware it cannot afford to.

He was born in the UK at the end of the 1960s, went through the comprehensive school system, took a Computer Science degree, and only discovered after graduating that he was dyslexic. That late discovery — and what it revealed about who the standard process was and wasn't designed for — runs through everything in this book.

This is not a theoretical treatment. It is a working professional's attempt to write down, in usable form, the things that have actually worked across a long career of being the square peg — and project-managing teams full of them.

Do Penguins
Dream of Flying
Underwater?