IMG 3085Managing Surprise - Building resilient organizations in turbulent times (6th DTU RISKLAB FORUM)

Written by Grant Sonne-Clifford, Nataliia Cherkashyna

"If you don't like surprises - don't be a project manager"

- from the workshop

On Wednesday the 4th of Sept. DTU delivered their annual Risk Management Lab giving participants a hands-on workshop on how to upgrade your risk management practices building resilient organizations. Improving organisations ability to notice, prepare for, and manage surprises.

In addition to this 20 risk management experts from Dutch industry participated giving a cross-cultural view of how risk is managed in the Netherlands. In particular, they shared their experience about the University of Twente - University of "high tech, human touch", where those who are interested in and working with risk management are getting an education in this field on 2 years master's programs.

Screen Shot 2019 09 29 at 07.50.38The workshop started in a nice and sustainable atmosphere, with some The agenda was quite intense, with Josef Oehmen, opening the event and preparing the participants for the day ahead. After the introduction, the framing talk on resilience thinking was given by Morten Wed from DTU. Triangle of resilience - a graph that represents development of the project when a surprise arises was discussed in detail.

The format of the workshop was perfectly balanced with talks and practical sessions replacing each other. The first workshop was dedicated to the surprises in participants' organizations, where people around the table shared their experiences and characterised the surprises in them.

The next talk was delivered by Lars from Novo Nordisk, who was talking about managing surprises "from real life". His strategical short list of how to deal with surprises is:

1. To minimise the risk of surprises
2. To optimise the trustworthy detection of surprises
3. To ensure an adequate responsiveness
 
 The second workshop was on planning for and noticing surprises. During this workshop, participants introduced and applied different characteristics to the discussed surprises, in order to understand and describe what does the deviation mean, where the project is and where is it heading after the surprise.
The next 2 presentations were given from a different prospectives of managing surprises. First, Søren Jacobsen from Nobina was talking about preparing for surprises from his current project - developing self-driving vehicles, and then Lars Frisk from Rambøll gave an overview of managing surprises and proper planning.
 
The third workshop was dedicated to responding to the surprises. It was extremely beneficial for the workshop and experience exchange that there were many professionals from different industries, shared their experience from various type of projects - in terms of time frame, budget, overall scale and types of risks associated with them. Talks were of a great insterest to the audience, and lively discussions during workshops created a very productive meeting for risk management professionals.
 
 
The event was sponsored by:

Managing Surprise Building resilient organizations in turbulent times 6th DTU RISKLAB FORUM logos