PROJECTS AS VEHICLES FOR CULTIVATING RESILIENCE

THE NEED FOR RESILIENCE IN THE GLOBAL RISK SOCIETY IS PARAMOUNT TO FUTURE-PROOF OURSELVES AGAINST INCREASINGLY FREQUENT LARGE-SCALE DISRUPTIONS AND DISASTERS.

As a scientific term ‘resilience’ arose initially in Engineering and Physics. The concept of resilience has become increasingly significant across multiple disciplines with a wide range of applications. Resilience connotes systemic, organisational, team and individual capabilities to absorb shocks and to learn from them, while simultaneously preparing for and responding to future change.

Resilience represents the ability to bounce back from failures, setbacks, and adversities. Management of resilience refers to actions to ensure that the system, an organisation, project, team or individual, continues to perform, or can rapidly restore performance, under such expected and unexpected disturbances.

WHAT DO PROJECTS HAVE TO DO WITH RESILIENCE?

Projects can be thought of as interventions into present systems to create something that is new, that did not presently exist. Project are always a throwing forward of an imagined reality into an established fact, transforming social, technical, and environmental systems. For example, a new metro line project is an intervention into people’s mobility with an impact not only on the transportation system of an entire city but also in their daily life or future infrastructure plans maybe for centuries.

Systems that seem to function well under present conditions may collapse when external conditions change, unless they allow for rapid response, restructuring and acceptance of disturbances and development of extant processes. For example, fossil fuel-based energy systems that powered industrial revolution and many great human achievements will not survive in their current form in the 21st century as their contribution to global environmental changes make the Earth increasingly less fit for human life.

Projects at their best can be:

1. Transition vehicles from unsustainable system arrangements; and

2. Response vehicles to system shocks such as social unrests, climate disasters, political instabilities, or economic and financial collapses.

These two roles of projects are illustrated in the diagram on the following page. The importance of resilience has been stated at the individual and team level and generalised to higher levels of analysis, including projects, organisations, and industrial networks, as well as nations globally (see graph below).

Role of projects in system transformation and recovery. (Source: The University of Sydney)

Projects are not anymore just about budget, scope and schedule as the metrics of value. Longer term recognition of the objectives of maintaining the resilience of multiple systems is expanding, which increasingly involves employees and their relations at work in the project; wider stakeholder relations, whether they be internal or external stakeholders; the ecology and issues of value in terms of sustainability and, of course, clients.

In project-based organisations, clear goals, namely a purpose that orients organisational action, and a culture of ‘learnability’ is essential to a successful development of resilience. Project leaders need to recognise their role as interventionists in social, environmental, and technical systems, building our future in a volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous world.

Organisations aiming to support learning of project leaders need to think deeply which skills and networks will help to lead ambitious interventions for more resilient futures – it is surely more than budgeting and scheduling.

Levels of resilience (Source: Naderpajouh et al., 2020)

Authors: This article was written by Dr Petr Matous, Dr Nader Naderpajouh and Professor Stewart Clegg. Petr is a Senior Lecturer at the School of Project Management and a researcher in the John Grill Institute for Project Leadership at the University of Sydney. Nader is a member of the John Grill Institute for Project Leadership and a Senior Lecturer at the University of Sydney, while he also holds an honorary position at Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT University). Stewart is a member of the School of Project Management and John Grill Institute for Project Leadership at the University of Sydney while being an Emeritus Professor at the University of Technology Sydney and a (virtual) Visiting Professor at the University of Stavanger, Norway and Universidade Nova, Portugal.