Wing It! Enacting Project Team Resilience in Response to Major Unexpected Events

When faced with major unexpected events, project teams must respond appropriately to return to a “normal” situation. This article argues that an effective capacity to improvise when major unexpected events occur contributes to project team resilience. Improvisation is a challenging concept to grasp, and some confusion exists as to what it is and what it entails. This concept is contextualized within the resilience discourse, and a model is proposed to explain how different actions, undertaken by project team when improvising, unfold over time in response to a major unexpected event. Next, the article identifies conditions that facilitate project management improvisation.