Unlearnt Uncertainty: Why We Need to Standardize Resilience Management

Arturas Kuliesas, PMP, PgMP, MSP-P, is an experienced project and program manager and a member of the board of the Lithuanian Project Management Association. He is a lecturer and trainer specializing in projects, programs, quality and risk management.

  Risk Management  

By now, there is a lot of evidence that project risk management as a practical measure against failed projects is, if not broken, at least in serious trouble (Vyas & Zweifel, 2022) (Flyvbjerg & Gardner, 2023). There are many manifestations of this trouble, but nowhere is it more pronounced than in the top-left corner of the risk matrix, which we call (for a good reason) the “Swan Lake”:

The Swan Lake is where our traditional risk management practices and tools we use for identification, assessment, and response break down and stop providing adequate results. To compare it to physics, you can think of it as a black hole of sorts.

This is the place where a huge number of possibilities of miniscule likelihood exist—but if they come true, the outcome can be of exorbitant impact on your project (negative or positive, but mostly negative). When they get realized, they get named “black swans” (actually, some of them are grey or white, but I will spare you of the details right now).

After more than 20 years of practical experience in project management, and some of it in the realm of megaprojects, I keep seeing the same pattern over on over:

1. Something bad happens that has barely ever happened before in this project, program, organization, or human race.
2. The project team scans an extensive risk register for a response …

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