Popular music runs on a rather deflating secret: most of it sits on the same three or four chords. Thousands of songs, across every decade and genre, share the same handful of changes — and yet each one feels entirely its own, because the melody, the lyric and the mood are where the originality lives. It is why a decent session musician can be handed a song they have never heard and play along by the second chorus: they are not divining the future, they are recognising the structure. Punk put it most bluntly — here are three chords, now go and form a band. Projects are just the same. The tune is yours. The chords are everybody's.
The sense of uniqueness is not foolishness; it is an honest report from the inside. When you are in a project you see its specifics in high resolution — the awkward stakeholder, the peculiar system, the deadline that makes no sense — and those specifics genuinely are particular to you. Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky called this the inside view: the natural habit of judging a situation from its vivid, singular details rather than from the duller evidence of how similar situations have actually tended to go. The inside view is why every project plan, drawn up in perfectly good faith, quietly assumes this will be the one that runs to time. It is also, they showed, why so few of them do — the planning fallacy is a failure not of effort but of perspective.
Step back, though, and the sameness is almost comic. Every project is conceived, justified, planned, delivered and — with luck — closed. Every one has a scope that wants to grow, a schedule that wants to slip, a cost that wants to climb, and benefits that must be defended against all three. Every one accumulates the same species of risk, stages the same arguments between the same archetypes of stakeholder, and needs someone to keep a steady rhythm of reporting so the whole thing does not quietly drift. A seasoned project manager walking into a new project is doing what the session musician does: not divining the melody, but recognising the changes — and reaching, quite unheroically, for the chord chart everyone else has used.
Which points to the single most useful discipline the “we're different” instinct tempts people to skip: looking honestly at how comparable projects actually turned out. This is the outside view — and Bent Flyvbjerg, whose work on major projects at Oxford turned it into a practical method, gave it a name: reference-class forecasting. The idea is disarmingly simple. Before you trust your own confident estimate, find the class of projects yours belongs to and ask how that class really performed — on cost, on time, on benefits — then let those base rates temper your plan. It feels almost insulting to be told that your bespoke, once-in-a-career endeavour is best predicted by a dreary average of its cousins. It is also, repeatedly, true.
None of which is to say novelty does not exist. Some projects genuinely break new ground, and a few are first-of-a-kind in ways that deserve real caution and real analysis. But even those are perhaps eighty or ninety per cent recognisable pattern and ten or twenty per cent genuine unknown. The waste lies in treating the whole thing as unprecedented — lavishing invention on the ninety per cent a template would have handled, and arriving at the ten per cent that actually needed your originality already exhausted.
This is, quite simply, the premise SSLM is built on. A light, repeatable framework only makes sense if projects share a shape — and they do, so it does. SSLM hands you the chord chart: one information-flow Model that fits a standard project, a ready-made pack of the artefacts you would otherwise rebuild from scratch, a lessons-learned habit so the class keeps teaching you, and — out in the Enterprise Extension — reference-class forecasting for when the estimates really matter. The aim of all of it is not to flatten what is special about your project, but the reverse: to make the ordinary parts cost you almost nothing, so your scarce attention can land where the genuine novelty is.
So, by all means feel the uniqueness — it is real, and it is where the interesting work lives. Just don't let the feeling talk you into rebuilding the wheel, ignoring the evidence, or believing yours is the project that will finally repeal the planning fallacy. Treat the tune as yours and the chords as everybody's: borrow the structure without shame, respect the base rates, and spend your originality where it will actually be missed.