Adaptive sense-making for crises in interorganizational projects: the case of International Islamabad Airport project

Crisis is getting attention in project management literature; despite such efforts the topic is still in its infancy. The amount of impact crises has on interorganizational projects drastically increases the significance of crisis management research and calls for dire need to make sense of them. Hence, the purpose of this research is to enhance the understanding of sense-making for crises when multiple organizations are involved in an interorganizational project. We collected data using interviews, observations, archival documents, and illustrative materials to study the case of the International Islamabad Airport project in Pakistan. For analysis, we used grounded theory. Findings provide evidence that both sense-making and sense-giving processes are integrated and engaged for making sense of crises in interorganizational projects. We identified three dimensions of interorganizational sense-making: information gathering (through internal and external sources); crisis interpretation (exogenous, endogenous, social, and technical crises); and reactive responses, which involve direct responses for controllable crises and indirect responses for uncontrollable crises. We also found reporting/recording crises to be an element of sense-giving. The study offers valuable insights on crisis management in interorganizational projects, suggesting that interorganizational projects can better respond to crises by adopting an adaptive and cyclic sense-making approach.