ABSTRACT
Business and government organizations can plan how they will authorize and support future urgent, unexpected work when suddenly needed to take advantage of surprises ranging from new business opportunities to the protection or restoration of assets. Lessons are not learned until they change behaviours. The chance that any one person not in the emergency services will ever manage urgent, unexpected work is small, and it's not possible to know who should be prepared for this. The lessons to be learned from these different cases in different industries are surprisingly similar. Urgency stated only qualitatively can have different meanings to the people involved. Expressing urgency quantitatively in money terms might avoid the problem that what is considered to be urgent by some might not be seen as urgent by others. Relationships with stakeholders might be the most difficult task of making a good start to urgent and unexpected work.
