The growing complexity of projects today, as well as the uncertainty inherent in innovative projects, is making obsolete traditional project management practices and procedures, which are based on the notion that much about a project is known at its start. The current high level of change and complexity confronting organizational leaders and managers requires a new approach to projects so they can be managed flexibly to embrace and exploit change. What once used to be considered extreme uncertainty is now the norm, and managing planned projects is being replaced by managing projects as they evolve. Successfully managing projects in extreme situations, such as polar and military expeditions, shows how to manage successfully projects in today's turbulent environment. Executed under the harshest and most unpredictable conditions, these projects are great sources for learning about how to manage unexpected and unforeseen situations as they occur. This book presents multiple case studies of managing extreme events as they happened during polar, mountain climbing, military, and rescue expeditions. A boat accident in the Artic is a lesson on how an effective project manager must be ambidextrous: on one hand able to follow plans and on the other hand able to abandon those plans when disaster strikes and improvise new ones in response. Polar expeditions also illustrate how a team can use "weak links" to go beyond its usual information network to acquire strategic information. Fire and rescues operations illustrate how one team member's knowledge can be transferred to the entire team. Military operations provide case material on how teams coordinate and make use of both individual and collective competencies. This groundbreaking work pushes the definitions of a project and project management to reveal new insight that benefits researchers, academics, and the practitioners managing projects in today's challenging and uncertain times.

In response to the rise of various forms of the extreme in economies, organizations and societies (such as disruptive innovation, climate emergency, financial crisis, high-risk sport, etc.), an ambitious 21st century program sets the agenda of management sciences around the unknown, disruption, uncertainty and risk. Management of Extreme Situations presents the research results from the conference organized at the Cerisy-la-Salle International Cultural Center, France, in 2016. It testifies to the existence of an international community that brings together, around management sciences, various disciplines studying the management concept of extreme situations. Through the analysis of varied contexts (polar and mountain expeditions, fire rescue services, exploration projects in the military field, creative industries, etc.), this book offers an initial grammar of the extreme. It presents a heuristic for the management of these situations - particularly in terms of sensemaking, ambidexterity and knowledge expansion.

The growing complexity of projects today, as well as the uncertainty inherent in innovative projects, is making obsolete traditional project management practices and procedures, which are based on the notion that much about a project is known at its start. The current high level of change and complexity confronting organizational leaders and managers requires a new approach to projects so they can be managed flexibly to embrace and exploit change. What once used to be considered extreme uncertainty is now the norm, and managing planned projects is being replaced by managing projects as they evolve. Successfully managing projects in extreme situations, such as polar and military expeditions, shows how to manage successfully projects in today's turbulent environment. Executed under the harshest and most unpredictable conditions, these projects are great sources for learning about how to manage unexpected and unforeseen situations as they occur. This book presents multiple case studies of managing extreme events as they happened during polar, mountain climbing, military, and rescue expeditions. A boat accident in the Artic is a lesson on how an effective project manager must be ambidextrous: on one hand able to follow plans and on the other hand able to abandon those plans when disaster strikes and improvise new ones in response. Polar expeditions also illustrate how a team can use "weak links" to go beyond its usual information network to acquire strategic information. Fire and rescues operations illustrate how one team member's knowledge can be transferred to the entire team. Military operations provide case material on how teams coordinate and make use of both individual and collective competencies. This groundbreaking work pushes the definitions of a project and project management to reveal new insight that benefits researchers, academics, and the practitioners managing projects in today's challenging and uncertain times.