Stiff surprise - coping with surprising discoveries in product development processes

Abstract

An incident in a product development project is analysed to see how participants cope differently with surprising situations. This generates cognitive variety in the project team which means that the situation is complex for the individual team member, but also that it is difficult to trace, here and now, causal chains on a collective level. The analysis is made possible by the authors being permitted to videofilm project management meetings and project members responding, individually, to play-back of a video sequence from a meeting they attended with the attached question'What is going on here'?