– there are thousands, if not tens of thousands, of elements that need to be aligned. You cannot easily imagine all the things that will be impacted, but by simply saying people cango back shopping , to work, to school, you are connecting all these little projects. Every time you do something it will impact everyone else. Everyone will respond – it is a multi-dimensional game where you cannot see the other players, or the moves they are making, but you do see the results. When you have made your move and somebody else has also responded, you think you have advanced to a certain space butfind yourself somewhere completely different, because you have impacted and been impacted by all the other actions. You do the best you can, recognising you do not understand the full implications. But as soon as you introduce part of the solution, you understand more of the problem, because it touches on aspects that you might not have considered, but which are clearly important. How does this all apply to industry? Some of the manufacturers I have spoken to looked at urgent needs within the health sector, providing equipment for them. They are doing that whilst trying tofigure out how to work with new rules, with social distancing, challenged supply chains and an uncertain future. It is about realigning operations while still thinking in the long-term that when this is all over you have to return to what you were doing before. However, people are slightly obsessed with the current situation and are not looking forward sufficiently. I have spent a lot of time working with organisations on agile approaches, and those who have experience in employing such approaches are more sensitised to the need to probe the environment and change course rapidly. A lot of organisations are fixated with the disaster aspects of what is happening. The biggest challenge is the need to shift between thinking about today, to thinking about tomorrow, two weeks, two months and two years from now. Survival now is about learning to become more adaptive, rather than just being risk averse. We normally do that because we want to justify the investment, the cost, but what this new reality is forcing us to do is become more adventurous. Solving problems in turbulent environments is about speeding up innovation. We do not understand all of the parameters, there is a lot of uncertainty, so we need to champion experimentation; we have to ask ‘what will happen if we try this?’ If it doesn’t work, we try something else. We take lessons from all approaches and see how we can move forward. This is not something we asked for, but there are opportunities to learn here. We can try out new approaches, we can become more adventurous. Change is happening all the time, we are learning new things, and we are going to need to become more resilient and more adaptive in how we do projects. We do not have time to start projects properly – if we normally have due diligence for a fewmonths, we cannot have that now. We need tofind a new way of balancing our anticipation and our love of planning, risk management and governance with the requirement to do things quickly and make rapid changes based on circumstances. There are tremendous opportunities because crises force us to rethink, change and improve. Professor Darren Dalcher is the founder and Director of the National Centre for Project Management in LUMS. d.dalcher@lancaster.ac.uk FIFTY FOURDEGREES | 25 We do not understand all of the parameters, so we cannot possibly imagine all the potential results. ʻʻ ʼʼ
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