Managing Surprises – Building Resilient Organizations in Turbulent Times

As (risk) managers, we love to "predict and plan".

But equally important is the ability to "monitor and react".

The ability to effectively deal with surprises is an important strategic skill for any organization. In this hands-on workshop, we will explore three critical skills for general managers and risk managers to create resilient organizations:

• Better preparing for surprises
• Better noticing surprises
• Better responding to surprises

The event is co-organized by IDA Risk and the DTU RiskLab . The workshop will bring together 20 risk management experts from Dutch industry (currently enrolled in the Executive Risk Management Master Program at the University of Twente) with 20 participants from Denmark.

As a participant, you will gain a state-of-the-art overview of organizational resilience through impulse talks by experts from DTU and industry, and apply resilience thinking in three workshops together with other industry participants.

As part of the day, you will learn about the latest findings at DTU as part of the international Brightline Initiative, a consortium of PMI and leading industry, government and academic partners to improve the success of strategy initiatives in organizations.

Program: (Download program)

from 08:00 Registration; networking and breakfast snacks

• 09:00 Welcome & introduction (Josef Oehmen, DTU)
• 09:15 Framing talk on resilience thinking (Morten Wied, DTU)
• 09:30 Workshop 1: Surprises in your organization
• 10:30 Break
• 10:50 Industry talk 1: On the certainty of surprise (Lars Eriksen, Novo Nordisk)
• 11:20 Workshop 2: On your planning for and noticing surprise
• 12:20 Lunch
• 13:20 Industry talk 2: Preparing for surprise (Søren Jacobsen, Nobina)
• 13:50 Industry talk 3: On managing surprise (Lars Frisk, Rambøll)
• 14:20 Break
• 14:40 Workshop 3: On responding to surprise in your organisation
• 15:40 Reflections & wrap-up (Josef Oehmen, DTU)
• 16:00 End of event

Additional information: We recommend reading our short article in the London School of Economics Business Review: Surprises - Leveraging the Unexpected in Strategy Implementation.

Preparation: We ask every participate to identify a recent case of an unexpected surprise in their organization. We will use that as a basis for discussion during the day.

The participation fee covers morning and afternoon snacks, lunch and drinks.


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