Stiff surprise on stiffness: an incident in product development in an alliance setting

An incident that occurred in a product development project is analyzed to see how participants cope differently with surprising situations. Variety in coping generates cognitive dissonance in the project team, which means that the situation not only is complex for the individual team member but that it is difficult to trace, here and now, causal chains on a collective level. The situation is aggravated if the problem occurs in an alliance setting, as more consultation is required to trace deviations from the expected and reach agreements on solutions. Furthermore, if the alliance is between companies in the car industry, with its articulated brand values, coping with surprises can be extremely stressful, with time schedules and budgets under pressure. This analysis was made possible by the authors being permitted to video-film project management meetings and project members responding, individually, to the playback of a video sequence from a meeting they attended with the attached question “What is going on here?”