24 | We are outside our comfort zones... ...Now, everything is urgent, critical, it must be done by tomorrow. ʻʻ Projectmanagement is obsessed with risk aversion, with preparing for and predicting everything down to thefinest of details, with governance structures. During theCovid-19 pandemic, that often excessive need to consider every eventuality has had to be forgotten and replacedwithmore pragmaticmeasures. The emergency nature of the reaction to the global outbreak means decisions must be made immediately, plans must be enacted in a matter of hours – or minutes – and contingency cannot always be accounted for. There are important lessons to be learned from the pandemic about operating in different ways, becoming more adaptive andflexible, and enabling rapid innovation. What we have seen through this crisis is that we need to become better at dealing with turbulence and uncertainty. Normally when you start a project, you have a grand vision that drives what you do. Here, we have an emergency: we need to do something quickly, and we do not know how what we do will impact anything else – we just need to restart, to do something new or differently. We are outside our comfort zones. Normally on projects, we work from left to right, we have an idea of what we want to be doing, we start shaping and planning, developing a business case. Now, everything is urgent, critical, it must be done by tomorrow. There is no time to plan as we move from one phase to another because action is needed. I have worked with the Red Cross and other organisations who deal with disaster response . Much as with Covid19, they cannot plan in advance – when they land on the ground, they see what they can do based on the resources they have; they prioritise based on urgency. You go through phases: saving lives, reestablishing certain things in the shortterm, then looking to the longer term and planning the recovery. There are lessons for our current situation, but with those emergencies you are trying to get back to normality after a sudden stop. This is different. We have essentially frozen life – everything around us – and we are trying to reestablish all of it at the same time.We need to deal with things on different timescales; we can think about schools today, tomorrow, in a month’s time, in six months’ time, and each of them is a different project. There are multiple phases of recovery and post-crisis – some operational and immediate, some longer-term – and it is about how we do these things in parallel. The Covid-19 situation is unprecedented in scale and scope, but also in dimensions – thinking about today, tomorrow, next week and next year at the same time is not something we normally do. We do not understand all of the parameters, so we cannot possibly imagine all the potential results. Elements that are usually known – how people shop , how they go to school, how they work – have gone and we are in a whole new reality where we know nothing. Everything has to be redesigned as you start running the projects – it’s urgent, it’s in-your-face with no time to stop and think, no opportunity to deliberate and renegotiate time and cost. All the projects are urgent, but we must be reasonable in accepting that we do not know all that will happen – you are prototyping answers to a situation nobody understands particularly well. What is more, everything is connected, it touches on everything else. When yousend schools back , there are implications for parents, for driving, for cars; when workers return, there are issues over office space, dining areas, supply chains. Normally in society, we tinker with one element at a time – here we have stopped all the elements, and restarting even one impacts everything else. I have been fascinated by the impacts of policy changes. When somebody makes an announcement saying you can go back to work, it is never that simple. Policy decisions from the top need to be connected all the way down ʼʼ
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