Understanding project resilience: Designed, cultivated or emergent?

Abstract

This paper combines insights from complexity and resilience research with a process view of project organizations to advance our understanding of project resilience. We propose the concept of evolving resilience as the dynamic interaction between perturbations and processes of anticipatory shaping, regular becoming and exceptional organizing in project networks. Adopting a theory elaboration approach, we apply an initial conceptual framework on data regarding four complex projects. This enables us to identify a typology of emergent responsiveness patterns, namely reinforce trajectory, bounce back to trajectory, and jump to alternative trajectory. This typology provides the building blocks for elaborating an integrative process model of evolving project resilience. Results contribute to research on project resilience, and on the complexity of front-end shaping and ongoing organizing processes, and sheds light on the debates surrounding agile methods and allocational versus relational contracts.