Hi Reader,

Have you ever attended a scramble party? I did recently.

A scramble party is where the host has the best intentions, but doesn't have a plan. So guests show up to a work-in-progress: someone’s setting the table, someone else is opening wine, someone's trying to get the music going, another person is asking, “Wait… are we cooking something or ordering in?”

And strangely, that’s part of the fun.

In the scramble party I attended, everyone pitched in. It was chaotic in an oddly collaborative way. Things came together on the fly.

The party ended up starting nearly two hours late. And somehow, for those of us who ended up doubling as the planning committee, it felt exactly on time. After hours of pulling everything together, we finally relaxed, shared some takeaway food, and played games for hours to good music.

The not-a-scramble party

A “not-a-scramble” party, in contrast, are well planned events where invitations go out more than a month in advance, starting with a save the date, followed by details, and then a few reminders just to keep it top of mind.

At the party, the host greets you at the door in their best outfit, looking completely at ease. The home smells like something delicious has been cooking for hours. The table is set for exactly the right number of guests, each place marked with a name. There are flowers not just on the table, but in the kitchen and even the powder room. Candles are glowing, music is playing, and the playlist is so good because everyone contributed to it in advance.

These types of parties are fun too, although they tend to be less collaborative. Everything usually follows the host’s plan, which makes the experience feel a little less shared.

Scrambled projects

A few of my projects feel like a chaotic scramble party lately. Not all of them, but some. We’re pulling things together at the last minute, collaborating in real time, and planning as we go. It feels that way because work keeps coming at us from unexpected directions, sometimes even backwards.

I’ve written before about Just in Time (JIT) project management, and this is one of those moments where it fits. Sometimes this approach is necessary, and when collaboration is strong and there is a clear, effective way to stay organized, everything can still come together. People adjust, contribute, and it works.

Scramble projects may not look perfectly planned from the outside, but when they work, it brings people together in a way that feels quite collaborative.

Recently, someone I mentor shared that she's been creating client deliverable summaries on the fly, almost like a scramble party, and surprisingly, it’s been effective. She and her team started with a high level summary of everything that needed to be done, then each person took sections and created summaries of those summaries.

It sounds a bit unusual, but it helped move the work forward. The team divided up the summaries, worked through them together, and slowly built the deliverables together.

So when do you know to scramble, and when not to scramble?

Scrambling works when clarity is still forming, when input is coming from multiple directions, and when momentum matters more than getting something finished. It works best when the goal is shared understanding, not perfection, and when people are willing to build structure as they go.

But there is a point where scrambling starts to get in the way. That’s when enough clarity exists to step back, organize what’s been created, and shift into “not-a-scramble” mode. This is where more traditional project management comes into play, where the work gets refined, aligned, and turned into something sustainable and repeatable.

But it's not about choosing one or the other. Instead, it’s knowing when to move between them.

Because the best outcomes often come from both: some scrambling activities to get things moving, and a thoughtful not-a-scramble to bring it all together.

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