The point is … the ingenuity of resilience escapes capture

After a global pandemic, a war in Europe: The world embarked on a quest for practicing and mastering resilience. How to cope with its cognitive, strategic, political, and ideological challenges (Hamel & Välikangas, 2003)? The cognitive challenge is the difficulty of seeing what is changing and crafting an appropriate response. The strategic challenge is about crises imposing their own immediacy for action (Paukku & Välikangas, 2021). The political challenge focuses on resourcing—or innovating—to the scale needed (Gibbert & Scranton, 2009). The ideological challenge is maintaining a creed that is radically open for generative resilience (Grandori, 2020). All four challenges are foundational for mastering resilience.

Consider these challenges in the context of nearby crises and related prior research.

The cognitive challenge is manifest in the disruptions such as the recent pandemic and the ongoing war that tend to take organizations and societies by surprise. It is easier to deny impending threats than to think about them. Even when some preparation has taken place, preplanned formal organizational responses often fail (Van Hecke et al., 2021; Williams & Shepherd, 2016). Beck & Plowman (2014) emphasized spontaneous ad hoc responses in early phases of the Columbia Shuttle disaster. Majchrzak et al. (2007) similarly found that the emergency response in Hurricane Katrina was initially dependent on serendipitous autonomous action at the level of individuals and local response groups as did Kornberger et al. (2019) in the refugee crisis in Europe. Crises tend to require the spontaneity of the self-organized responses while waiting for more traditional institutional resources coming to help (such as the Federal Emergency Management Agency in the United States or the Health Emergency Response and Health Authority currently under founding in the European Union).

In terms of the strategic challenge, Kornberger et al. (2019, p. 255) suggest a war-like modus operandi—a Clausewitzian logic of tact—in situations where sustaining the capacity to act is critical in the midst of the fog of a crisis (or war). Time is of essence: Basic survival help may be critical during the first 72 h of a crisis (Bergström, 2018). To prolong the chances, “controlling time” is pursued in cybersecurity games that distract the enemy to attend to false clues and thus allow a more careful development of a response. Recent geopolitical events point to the attempts to manipulate the unfolding narrative (Russian State Media Bolster Putin's Narrative for Ukraine Invasion, Wall Street Journal, 26 February 2022) with timed release of intelligence but crisis events also point to the dangers of contracting sense making under time pressures (Cornelissen et al., 2014). In a crisis, the strategic challenge becomes about intuitively acting in the “thick of time” (Garud & Gehman, 2012, p. 989).

The political challenge is commensurable to the severity of the crisis or the disruptiveness of the opportunity. Experiencing a 3.0 Richter scale earthquake (“minor damage”) is quite different from 8.0 Richter scale earthquake (“Serious, community erasing damage”). Perhaps our political liability in facing up to climate change currently in the developed world is that we think it to be a minor hassle when scientists are predicting major community-destroying events. There is also a danger of escalation that fails to keep up with the resourcing challenges: A limited military intervention may turn to an all-out war requiring the fight-to-death defense of national sovereignty. Diverting resources from business-as-usual tends to be particularly hard when coupled with the cognitive temptation of delaying the acceptance of the eventual.

The ideological challenge may be the toughest to master. Financial Times (Why Capitalism Needs to be Reset in 2020, 12.30.2019) called for reinventing capitalism as an ideology behind business. Managerialism as a way to run a company has been frequently questioned despite its industrial era efficiency (Gulati, 2022). It seems that there is current demand for organizational ideologies that support self-organizing (Zohar, 2016) without being overly directed by formal management processes; that there is demand for uplifting the purpose for which companies are founded beyond narrowly defined profit; and that organizational environments should be steeped with “socially enabling mechanisms” that expect and legitimate resilience and have shaped the absorptive capacity for organization wide resilience and innovation (Lewin et al., 2011). At the same time, there are calls for “strong” leaders amidst all uncertainty, volatility, and ambiguity. Perhaps that is where the resilience battle currently resides: ambiguity of open organizing against subservience to a person or cause.

This brief scorecard suggests that organizations largely fail many of the cognitive, strategic, political challenges and that the ideological challenge is becoming increasingly dominating. Yet despite manifest failures in anticipating, planning, and resourcing for recent crises, the resilience that has been revealed by many organizations and societies is astounding. This may be partly explained by resilience deriving from many wellsprings and manifesting equifinality in organizing designs, processes, and outcomes. Resilience is ingrained in “competing on the edge” (Brown & Eisenhardt, 1998) where the global marketplace forces continuously to earn customer favor. Collective identity develops in crisis (Beck & Plowman, 2014). Adaptive resilience is rooted in intentionally seeking best-in-class organizational comparison groups (Massini et al., 2005). Similarly, organizations that have a history of systematic strategic reorientations will have developed dynamic adaptation capabilities (Lewin et al., 2017) that can integrate exploration search strategies in support of requisite variety Ashby (1958) and new knowledge creation, (Katila & Ahuja, 2002). Finally, mimetic isomorphic pressures drive imitation of resilient innovators, thus spreading legitimated practices (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983).

A theory that suggests a singular pathway to resilience would be highly anti-resilient as it would be easy to disrupt by those with an interest for doing so. In resilience like innovation, the point is to engage in the quest—the continuous exploration of the new—rather than focus on the outcome (Garud et al., 2011; March & Sutton, 1997). Most innovations fail in any case; most quests for being resilient may fall short but still matter. In other words, the quest for resilience may be more important than its immediate outcome.

There has been a vast renewed interest in academic research and a proliferation of studies documenting resilience events and organizational practices. Literature reviews have been accompanying the burgeoning academic scholarship and practitioner literature. Some reviews suggest the concept of resilience is fragmented (Conz & Magnani, 2020); others doubt its usefulness as a construct (Hillmann & Guenther, 2021) or criticize its outcome focus and descriptiveness (Lengnick-Hall et al., 2011). Nevertheless, most authors end up seeking to redefine resilience for the benefit of future research, whether more dynamically, more parsimoniously, or in an integrative manner across different research streams (Linnenluecke, 2017). For example, Williams et al. (2017) suggest fusing crisis management and resilience research streams.

It may be that conceptually, resilience is lopsided: It is easy to identify its failures but difficult to predicate its successes. This may be because resilience as a phenomenon is multifaceted and generative (Grandori, 2020)—shall we say resilient?—in its many expressions, pathways, and springboards. Resilience as a concept is like life itself: serendipitous, persistent, and adaptive. A business review article, or two, can point to its deficiencies but hardly capture all its ingenuities.