Different road condition require different suspension systems and settings to a car. If you are driving on roads in perfect mint condition, you need a different level of absorption than when you are following a trail through the jungle or the dessert.

What conditions have the roads you drive your project on?

Photography by Freeparking.

If you work under mint conditions you can create the perfect plan, centralize control and outline every detail in a procedure. You can hit the big red button that reads "EFFICIENCY".

If you drive in "EFFICIENCY" mode and steer through the jungle of Borneo, you will wreck the bottom of your car on the first turn. What you need here is absorption, the ability to handle unexpected disturbances; you need to hit the big green button with "RESILIENCE" on it.
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You can tell, can't you? It is a dead give away… I cannot stop thinking about resilience!

Check out the Youtube channel of The Stockholm Resilience Centre, it has informational short videos about …. resilience… like this one: What Is Resilience?



If you like podcasts, how about one hour "Resilience: Adaptation and Transformation in Turbulent Times"?

"Resilience…the capacity to absorb shocks to the system without losing the ability to function. Can whole societies become resilient in the face of traumatic change? In April 2008, natural and social scientists from around the world gathered in Stockholm, Sweden for a first-ever global conference applying lessons from nature’s resilience to human societies in the throes of unprecedented transition."

Panarchy provides us a wide angle lens to look at projects. Originating from socio-ecological field studies this powerful concept lets us capture the project, the individual team members and the embedding organization in one go. Previously I discussed the ideas behind Panarchy: the adaptive cycle, multiple scales and the interaction of multiple scales. In this post, I'll explore what these aspects mean for resilience, the capacity, e.g. of a project to adapt to changes.

Photography by t3rmin4t0r.

The interactions between the different scales across a panarchy are important in respect to resilience. In terms of Panarchy, three elements are considered: the focal system (in our case "the project"), the higher scales (e.g. the company, or professional group, or society) and the lower scales (e.g. individuals or teams).
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Previously I wrote about using the concept of Panarchy to analyze complex problems. This concept can assist Project Managers dealing with today's complexities. If you haven't read the previous post, I suggest you catch up on that one, before proceeding. But of course, it's up to you.

Photography by Tinken.

For a long time, firefighters used the wrong strategy to attack forest fires. The approach taken was to extinguish the fire as soon as possible, as small as possible. If a small tree is on fire, put it out immediately. By solving the problem at the "individual tree level" you didn't have the issue on a larger scale, "the forest level".
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Reality is difficult to analyze. Project Managers still have to eliminate root-causes to major problems though. How to analyze today's complexity? I found something worthwhile exploring: Panarchy. Its origin is in ecosystem management, where it is used for assessment on how ecosystems, social systems and economic systems are interacting. How complex do you want to go?

Photography by Tscherno.

"Panarchy is a conceptual framework to account for the dual, and seemingly contradictory, characteristics of all complex systems – stability and change. It is the study of how economic growth and human development depend on ecosystems and institutions, and how they interact." (from SustainableScale.org)

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For the person who wrote: "When looking daily at the remains of my planning I feel like an FBI Profiler, or more appropriate, a Project Profiler.", the latest article by Malcolm Gladwell is a welcome wake up call.

I am the person writing about the Project Profiler. And Gladwell, author of the The Tipping Point and Blink, writes in Dangerous Minds about the effectiveness of FBI Profilers.

"In the mid-nineties, the British Home Office analyzed a hundred and eighty-four crimes, to see how many times profiles led to the arrest of a criminal. The profile worked in five of those cases."

"The fact is that different offenders can exhibit the same behaviors for completely different reasons…"

"Youve got a rapist who attacks a woman in the park and pulls her shirt up over her face. Why? What does that mean? There are ten different things it could mean. It could mean he doesnt want to see her. It could mean he doesnt want her to see him. It could mean he wants to see her breasts, he wants to imagine someone else, he wants to incapacitate her arms”all of those are possibilities. You cant just look at one behavior in isolation."

In the end he concludes that its effectiveness is only in combination with other disciplines of the FBI. It is never the Behavioral Unit alone that solves the crime.

But I will be back!