Do Penguins Dream of Flying Underwater

The Argument

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.

Shorter risk registers are not safer projects. They are projects where fewer people were able to see what was coming. A team's eyes are exactly as wide as its diversity — and a risk nobody could name is the one that eats you.

So there is a tension between two true things: diversity is hard to project-manage, and it is essential to project success. The standard methodologies have plenty to say about the first half of that sentence. Almost nothing about the second.

That gap is the whole subject. Not a case for diversity — that case is made. A working method for getting the value back out of it, from someone who has spent three decades running large, global, regulated programmes.

A penguin flying underwater — a bird that looks like a failure in the air and turns out to be a master below it — A bird out of water is still a master. You're just watching it in the wrong element.

If that rings true

There's a book about how to do it.

Do Penguins Dream of Flying Underwater? is the long version of the argument above — written from inside the discipline, for working project managers and anyone who works on a team.

Ten chapters, each one taking a standard piece of project management — communications, risk, cost, scope, quality — and asking the question the manuals skip: what happens to this when the team doesn't all think the same way?

Every chapter opens with a high-level summary and goes deeper from there, carries a signature illustration, and ends with a reflection and one concrete thing to go and try. Read it end to end, or jump to the problem on your desk this week.

In paperback, hardback and Kindle, from Amazon stores in the UK, US, Canada, Australia, Europe, India and Japan.

Get the book

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.

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 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".

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. Send me what you get.

No AI of your own, but a good idea? Email it to hello@dopenguins.com 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 Send me what you make →

A note on the Crèche

The book ends with an invitation to a crèche — somewhere to bring half-formed thoughts, honest failures and hard-won fixes, and keep them warm among people who get it. It was built. It stayed quiet. Rather than leave an empty room with the lights on, it has been closed.

The risk chapter asks you to look at a log and tell the honestly scored lines from the comfortably scored ones. This is one of those lines, so here it is, scored honestly: a good idea that did not work is still one that did not work.

The invitation itself stands. If you have a half-formed thought, an honest failure, or a fix that earned its keep, send it to hello@dopenguins.com. It gets read, and it gets answered.

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.

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 was written by the AI editor itself — an honest recount, week by week, 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.

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

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 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.