DOI: https://doi.org/10.36347/sjebm.2026.v13i07.003

Pages: 379-388

Projects today face a category of risk that most formal management systems were never built to handle. Rare, high-impact events that arrive without warning and resist meaningful prediction have become a genuine feature of the project landscape, not an occasional anomaly. Despite decades of refinement, mainstream project risk management continues to operate on the assumption that careful planning and structured risk registers will capture what can go wrong. For the class of events this paper examines, that assumption simply does not hold. The paper identifies five structural weaknesses in conventional risk management and proposes the Dynamic Adaptive Risk Management (DARM) framework as a direct response. DARM integrates four theoretical traditions: Complexity Theory, Resilience Engineering, High-Reliability Organization Theory, and Dynamic Capabilities Theory. These are brought together into a four-layer operational model built around a continuous cycle of Sensing, Assessing, Responding, and Learning, supported by five foundational enablers and oriented toward five desired outcomes. The central argument is that resilience to rare, extreme disruption is not built through more accurate prediction. It is built through the organizational capacity to detect early signals, adapt quickly when surprises arrive, and grow stronger from every disruption survived.