Thoughts on Resilient Practice Managing Complexity

Resilience is the ability to recover from a shock, insult or disturbance. The concept of resilience originating from physics lately found a widespread application. From a management perspective and especially in reference to the practice of managing complexity, two developments are of interest. These are firstly the application of the resilience concept in psychology and secondly the application to organisational sciences. Resilient practice as an answer to the challenges of complexity is promising. And although we can refer to ancient Zen practices we have to admit that for management we are standing at the very beginning of an endeavour into the unknown. We know that we have to take on this challenge if we not only want to be prepared but also be able to meet the great challenges of our time which are not smaller than global, for example, climate change, the dynamics of financial markets, epidemic diseases, poverty and famine, to name just a few. We need to understand what a resilient  practice in management may be. We need to engage in new practices until we can master it. And we need to develop a systemic understanding of social complexity capable of innovating and improving not only the practices of complex project management, but of management in general.

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