Resilience Management

The goal of the Resilience Management framework is to increase the situational awareness and gain a deeper understanding of the possible vulnerabilities of organized work such as projects, programs or portfolios. The Resilience Management framework links all the different planning steps such as risk management, business continuity and emergency management planning. Resilience Management can be undertaken in both portfolios and programs, but the focus of this article will be the integration of the framework in projects specifically. This article describes and discuss how a project can integrate Resilience Management tools as part of an iterative process. Resilience Management is defined by the capacity of the project system to be aware of its surroundings and vulnerabilities, and to adapt in order to recover from disruptive events and achieve its objectives. A projects manager can choose to use individual elements of Resilience Management, or use multiple in conjunction to increase the resilience of the project, regardless, the elements needs to be executed in a relatively short timeframe and, in the case of multiple elements, sequential without interruptions, to retain knowledge and yield the optimal advantage of the framework. The process time of the Resilience Management framework is dependent on both the scope and size of the project, and at what level of the project the process should be conducted in the project team. Typically, the Resilience Management process take between one week and one month.

Big idea

Background

The concept of resilience is borrowed from metallurgy but used also in psychology and sociology is resilience. Any academic development on risk management, must refer to it, and a growing number of annual reports for global companies include it in their risk presentation. Although this explosion is relatively new in the last five years, as early as the nineties, the Canadian Auditors Associations provided the first definition in a guide for its members. In metallurgy, the resilience of a metal measures its capacity to regain its elastic qualities after a stress, mechanic or thermic; in social sciences, it measures the capacity of an individual, or an organization, to adapt to a rapidly changing environment. Among the topics is the taunting issue that companies must improve flexibility without deviating from their core missions. However, the way in which they carry the mission may have to adapt to changing expectations. For example, it may not be efficient for a single product company diversify because that would dilute its efforts to provide optimal benefits to consumers for its desired product. In the same time, it should remain keenly aware should the consumers’ taste move away from its one product and move ahead of its competitors or substitutes to anticipate such evolution.

General

The general purpose of any risk management is to prepare and ensure the survival of the project, regardless the external circumstance it may face. Resilience, in perspective to risk management, measures or assesses the prospect of a project to recover after a major change in the environment. This will typically require that the organization will be able to fulfil its major obligations to its main stakeholders, i.e.: • society, comply with laws and regulations • personnel, retain employment levels & pays salaries • economic partner, secure contractual terms and conditions • stockholders, maintain profitability & dividends

Application

Noticing

The first step in resilience management is to make the participant of the project aware of the risks of a project. This can be challenging to do in a fashion that will not lead to a state of paranoia, where the project is slowly lead on a path of fatalism. However, a state of ‘chronic unease’ (Reason 2008) – a heightened and yet focused awareness of failure - is one that we can strive for. The following actions may provide a start;

Moving the onus of proof

Long periods of success in a project can lead to a state of dilutional thinking, and give a perception that failure is not an option. Most project managers hope to have a state of autonomy in the participant of the project where the project seems like a routine exercise, however, the downside of this is the difficulty to convince the participants to keep the possibility of risk in mind. The longer a project is run without any problems or complications also reduces the likelihood of the participant to keep the possibility of risk in mind. Here it is important for the project manager to assume that the project is risky and complex until proven otherwise. Even when reports indicate a mostly positive state, investigate and question the people with this perception.

Making people imagine

We tend to focus on risks because they are tangible and measurable and thus provide us with the comfort of (relative) certainty. With the help of some tools, such as Scenario Planning, we can make people imagine uncertainty – ambiguous, and difficult to measure – from a range of different perspectives. This is unlikely to provide accurate predictions about how the future will unfold, but it makes people appreciate the richness of multiple possible futures. It also gives ‘permission’ to worry, express doubts and raise concerns that cannot necessarily be quantified for ‘traditional’ risk management. The inability to ‘prove’ a problem must not preclude it being aired, and management support for such a culture is powerful (not to mention uncommon). A project leader can, and should, use tools that strive for accuracy and prediction. Know their limitations! Use additional techniques, not for the purpose of determining a single, most likely future, but to strive to explore the murky uncertainties that normally remain undiscussed. What we cannot measure and articulate with confidence makes us uneasy. It is preferable to stay in our comfort zone, and not worry about, let alone raise, such concerns. As a manager it is important to allow these ideas to be surfaced and discussed. To reject someone’s worries out of hand or perhaps to challenge them for data sends a clear signal not to try that again. It is a delicate exercise to build greater vigilance - hard to promote, yet easy to discourage. The key is to make the team ‘at ease’ with feeling uneasy about their project.

Identification

Over-optimistic forecasts of likely project performance, based on under-estimating the complexity of projects and the reality of likely risks, coupled with an over-optimistic assessment of the project team’s ability to deal with risk and uncertainty, is a major problem for project decision-making. Estimates tend to become commitments that, in turn, become anchors for later decisions. Given this, projects can become brittle and fragile – the slightest risk might derail them if the original commitments were dangerously optimistic. On very narrow measures of success for the immediate outputs (time, cost, quality), risk occurrences may lead swiftly to failure – it is almost an inevitably. Worse still, people are cognitively hardwired to be optimistic, either for political reasons (getting the project funded or awarded in the first place) or (more often, perhaps) psychologically. We delude ourselves and we are all complicit with each other in that delusion. The problem faced by project leaders is that they must find ways of countering this tendency – of stepping back, looking at the project plan with more realistic, dispassionate eyes and injecting some reality (perhaps even pessimism) into the planning process. Project managers are often unable to do this as they are too involved in the ‘process’ and are as subject to the same cognitive biases as everyone else involved in the work. Instead, the project manager must take a leadership role, focusing on people rather than structure and process, taking a longer-term rather than shorter-term view, challenging the status quo and being innovative rather than administrative. Beyond the practical things that can be done to help balance out optimism bias and organizational amnesia, the project manager as a leader has a key role in shaping the forecasts and avoiding over-simplification of the risk and uncertainty involved in delivering the project.

Asking inconvenient questions

If the project leader is able to emotionally and structurally detach him- or herself from the project – a difficult enough task – he or she can (as required) slip into the role of a devil’s advocate that all projects require to combat our tendency to oversimplify. They will be able to challenge the ‘inside view’ and access the ‘outside view’ that may be more realistic. They will be able to prompt memory, encouraging the experts to recall past projects and consider what may go wrong, why it may go wrong and how they could deal with any risk and uncertainty. The focus of questioning is to probe limitations in everybody’s preparation and readiness, and not to question anyone’s competence. As inconvenient as these questions may be, they are essential to challenge oversimplification and to encourage new ways of thinking.

Distinguishing between noise and ‘real’ Risk and Uncertainty

In adopting a dialectic decision-making role, the project leader can encourage a focus on the important risks, where management attention needs to be focused. The issue is to distinguish between what ‘matters’ and what does not. Based on an active reporting culture, you may be bombarded with stakeholders’ concerns and flooded with ‘what might go wrong’ in the project. It is the job of a project leader to filter out those important messages that are vital to respond to. In order not to discourage any report of impending failure, consider all messages as important, though. With the help of the messenger, raise some important questions such as: • Has this happened before? Is an indication of systemic risk and uncertainty? • May it influence a part/function of the project that is critical? • How close have you been to this risk/uncertainty? Do we require more information? • How quickly can this cascade into a bigger threat? These kinds of questions can enable effective decisions to be made about risk; to filter out the less important risks and concentrate on those that will impact on value. Be sensitive, though, that the messenger as well as the wider team may be conditioned by optimism bias.

Preparing

Risk and uncertainty can emerge at any time, in any form, from any source. The project team needs to be prepared to deal with whatever might happen. They need to be vigilant in looking for the weak signals as they begin to emerge, alert to threats, and alive to opportunities. It is both difficult and counterproductive to seal the project off from its environment in the hope of ‘keeping risk out’, and equally problematic (and more than likely, ineffective) to tighten rules and procedures in the hope of eliminating project failure. Preparation begins with standard risk procedures (routines) being put in place but it is dangerous to leave things there in the hope that this covers all eventualities. The risk register should be just a starting point – there are several risks which will have been missed or downgraded, together with a host of uncertainties. It is incumbent on the project leader to create a sense of readiness among the project team, so that they are not just ready for the expected but appreciate the threat of the unexpected. This means empowering the project team, providing the freedom and latitude to act, and creating a culture of communication by removing the barriers that might prevent this, thereby enhancing flexibility.

Maintaining goal flexibility

If project iterations are implemented, a key aspect is not simply to progress to the next iteration but to ensure that a short phase of reflection occurs. Seeking to learn from the previous output and considering how this may influence the overall goal is valuable. These short but intense reflection periods may include questioning how the experience of the completed iteration influences the project delivery process and what it means for the overarching project goal. It reflects how value evolves. As a result, it is important to communicate and sensitize people to the idea that nothing is necessarily set in stone and that the learning from an iteration informs subsequent iterations.

Empowering project members

Exhorting project managers/leaders to empower workers and staff to act on their own initiative can be difficult. There are two general problems: that the leader is reluctant to lose what they perceive as control; and that workers are reluctant to take responsibility. From the leader’s point of view, a transformational model is far more effective than a transactional model. Transactional leaders focus on role supervision, organization and compliance, paying attention to work performed in order to spot faults and deviations. Transformational leaders focus on being a role model, inspiring and keeping workers interested, challenging project workers to take greater ownership for their work, and understanding their strengths and weaknesses: • Empowered project workers need to have some control over how they direct their work. This means having the freedom to express flexibility and creativity. It also means that project workers will act on their own initiative, but this flexibility needs to be within limits (‘freedom with fences’), which needs to be explained to project staff. • Giving up control and empowering a project team might feel like a terrifying experience for many project leaders used to a transactional model of control and compliance. The temptation is to watch the workers’ every move, but by monitoring someone closely, their ability to grow, learn and build confidence to act is impeded. The project workers need to be given space and need to be trusted.

Containing

The art of containing People experiencing risk and uncertainty need to take appropriate action. Where time is sufficient to prevent a crisis from happening, leadership is required to support the containment of risk and uncertainty. It is tempting to ‘pre-load’ responses and make people do what has been defined in advance. Uncertainty makes such a ‘process’ approach risky, as novelty and ambiguity require reflection and deliberation, not necessarily the ‘blind’, ‘unthinking’, adherence to what has been defined as a response to a past problem.

Increasing readiness

Preparation is just part of the story, though. The preparation of the project team and key stakeholders means that they have the organizational system and understanding in place to scan for and communicate risk and uncertainty and that they are not complacent about their preparedness. However, readiness implies that the team is set to put their preparation into action, to be willing to execute what they have prepared for. Such commitment to act immediately – when adversity strikes - requires a number of other factors. Key among these is transparency. People must be encouraged not to conceal or hide problems and the outcomes of projects should be measured using an agreed methodology. Apart from anything else, public reporting of outcomes can act as a powerful driver for improvement.

Facilitating improvisation

Improvisation can take on a purposeful, considered dimension. A commitment to resilience in projects requires an expectation that project teams will improvise around unexpected problems. In this context, improvisation is not a complete absence of structure to decision making, implying chaos, randomness and disorder. It is not simply ‘making it up as you go along’. Using Jazz as a metaphor, the performers (project staff) improvise around a structure and plan. Like Jazz musicians, improvising managers continuously invent novel responses without a predetermined script and with little certainty as to the exact outcome of their actions. The consequences of their decisions unfold as the activities themselves are enacted.

Recovering

In-Progress

Limitations

Resilience Management is still a very recent field of research that needs to be reinforced by qualitative and quantitative academic studies. It should be noted that the way Resilience Management has been presented in this article is one of many, due to its young origin. This, of course, is to be considered a big limitation when perusing additional research.

NOTES

In-Progress

No need to comment on the following, since it is a work in progress and not done at all.

1. References
2. Recovering
3. Grammar
4. Figures – NONE at the moment