Collaboration in a crisis

Survivors of 9/11 tell us there was little panic in the World Trade Centre buildings as thousands fled for their lives. Rather, we hear reports of many acts of kindness and camaraderie – and singing. Fast-forward to 2020 and another disaster. This time we see viral videos of Italians singing from their balconies as the COVID-19 pandemic ravaged the country.

Panic is rare, even in the most desperate situations. Courage, solidarity, generosity and altruism are far more common responses. On 22 March 2020, the day before the UK government placed the country into lockdown, 1,000 volunteer groups had been set up, with tens of thousands of people coming forward to assist those in self-isolation.

The author and journalist Amanda Ripley interviewed many survivors and witnesses of disasters for her remarkable book The Unthinkable: Who Survives When the Disaster Strikes – and Why. Ripley finds that people rarely panic in disasters. The reason, she suggests, is that it is not a useful survival tactic. “We probably could not have evolved to this point by doing it very often,” she writes.

Rather than panic, we seem to be wired to respond by cooperating and organising in rapidly improvised groups and networks, or what Rebecca Solnit calls ‘disaster communities’ in another remarkable and topical book, A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster. We do this, it seems, to safeguard ourselves and others close to us, and to share what resources and knowledge we have, so that our group can adapt to the new reality.

The COVID-19 crisis shows how these informal groups and networks outperform formal organisations and hierarchies for speed and quality of response. Take notes on how these groups work – they will be useful after the storm.

Right now in the UK, volunteer groups are delivering food to remote rural communities, and to refugees and asylum seekers who have no family or other connections to call on. At the time of writing, in April, the Meals for the NHS group has raised £1.2 million and delivered 43,000 meals to front-line staff in 52 UK hospitals. Compare this with the dismal performance of most Western governments in organising COVID-19 testing for their citizens.

The pandemic presents us with an opportunity to observe and learn in real time how to respond, organise, make decisions and adapt in chaotic and unstable environments. And it offers us valuable insights into how, as project professionals, we can train ourselves, our organisations and our clients to survive the COVID-19 crisis and come out of it stronger.

What we can learn from disaster communities

Let’s start by looking at some of the characteristics of disaster communities. First, they are spontaneous – they form and become active extremely quickly. And they are localised, not centralised. They form around local needs, such as those of remote rural communities or urban refugees. They don’t require (and they don’t wait for) permission or approval from government or any other authority. Initially they are autonomous, non-hierarchical and self-organising, but soon they may form into networks with other groups for mutual support to achieve common goals.

Improvisation is a characteristic behaviour of disaster communities. In a crisis, there is no playbook, no best practice, no air-dropped survival kits. We must improvise with existing knowledge and resources, and quickly find ways of using and combining what we have in order to satisfy emerging local needs. In a disaster, communities cannot afford to cling to preferred pre-crisis processes or mental models, and there is no time to wait for more or better resources to arrive, even assuming we can access or afford them.

Improvisation involves using the means we have available, no matter that they were not designed or intended to be used to meet the needs we now face. We must experiment, tinker and repurpose our resources, our practices and our tools to meet the emerging needs of our community.

Improvising with what is to hand

The anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss called this bricolage and contrasted it with engineering. While the engineer plans ahead and prepares all the necessary resources before starting a project, the bricoleur improvises with what is available in the moment. So far, so logical, but other characteristic behaviours of disaster communities seem less rational.

We rightly regard volunteers, medical staff, delivery drivers and others as heroes for putting their own lives at risk to serve others, but just as we are wired to support our communities in a crisis, it seems that we have a strong motivation to expose ourselves to the danger. Almost every terrorist atrocity of recent times has produced its heroes. Rick Rescorla was the head of security for Morgan Stanley in the south tower of the World Trade Centre on 9/11, and is credited with saving more than 2,600 lives. He was last seen near the 10th floor on his way up to help evacuate the last of his colleagues from the building.

There may be more going on here than altruism. At least some of us are drawn to danger. And it may be that this, too, is an adaptive behaviour that in the past gave us some evolutionary advantage. Recent discoveries reveal that groups of Neanderthals walked across the surface of an active volcano in central Italy around 345,000 years ago, leaving footprints in the cooling lava flows just hours or days after the eruption. Our ancestors may have gained useful knowledge, skills and resources (such as volcanic rocks to make new kinds of tools) by approaching these hazards. By exposing ourselves to risk, we are able to access new resources and knowledge that could transform our practices and create advantages for us that would not be available when ‘playing it safe’.

Project management requires more experimentation

As a profession, what are we: bricoleurs or engineers? And how far are we prepared to roam, and at what risk, to expand our repertoire of skills, tools and techniques, and to enable our organisations and clients to adapt and prosper? These are not idle questions. COVID-19 forces us to answer them, and to give different responses to those we would have given just a few months ago.

As we look out into the pandemic-stricken world, and the economic depression ahead, we need to be more bricoleur. For the last decade or more since the global financial crisis, we have heard a lot about ‘doing more with less’. Now, businesses need people who can do something with nothing, bricoleurs able to work with existing resources and capabilities, repurposing and combining them to serve new needs and create new forms of value.

Project management and strategy execution look quite different in this new world. Carefully tracking the performance of resources allocated to us will seem like a bygone luxury. Instead, business and society need us to be able to interpret emerging and unarticulated needs, and rapidly experiment with available (and perhaps long-forgotten) skills and assets. Pressure to perform will be great, so we should start training ourselves now.

In this challenging business environment, there will be little room for our profession’s sometimes obsessive preoccupation with methodology. In a matter of weeks, many millions of organisations of all sizes have rapidly implemented changes that, in normal times, would have taken months if not years to plan and execute – and they did it not through devotion to linear or iterative life cycles, but by decentralising decision-making, trusting and empowering staff, sensing and responding through short feedback loops, and getting the apparatus of control out of people’s way.

APM made a bold step forward in recognising hybrid life cycles (a form of bricolage) in the APM Body of Knowledge 7th edition (2019), placing practicality above purism. This step looks prescient now. But I believe we need to go further. Next year will be 20 years since the Agile Manifesto was created. The debate is over. It’s time to move on. The pandemic and the resulting economic and social crisis call for new thinking. Now is the time for us to start reimaging project management for a post-pandemic world by drawing on applied complexity and systems theory; disaster and emergency response and recovery; global development; community preparedness and resilience; and history, archaeology and anthropology, subjects too long neglected by this profession.

There are challenges here for us as a profession. To meet them, we must be prepared to let go of some of the beliefs and logic we held dear before the crisis. But there’s no need to panic. Rather, let’s prepare to play our part in rebuilding our businesses and communities so that they are not only ready for the next shock when it comes, but also able to take advantage of it. Let’s start today.

Dr Matthew Moran is head of transformation at the Open University and occasional lecturer at the Open University Business School