Organizing for Resilience: How to Organize in a World of Adversity and Flux

The aim of this symposium is to explore the concept of organizational resilience and ask what it means to organize resiliently. Researchers on four separate projects will present emerging empirical findings on how organizations in Africa, Europe, and North America organized in the face of significant adversities during Ebola and COVID-19 pandemics. The presentations included in this symposium promise to further understandings of organizational resilience by exploring how organizations emergently adjust in the face of unprecedented and long-lasted crisis and adversity. The projects also explore how capability endowments, including routines, staff, and other resources are made to work together in novel ways in response to dynamic unfolding situations. The role of temporal dynamics in resilience is also taken up by several projects. Kathleen Sutcliffe, a well-known expert on the topic of organizational resilience, will lead a group discussion not only of the four presentations, but also of her own thoughts about how future work could advance theory and practice of organizational resilience. Towards a Diachronic Perspective on Coordinating in Crises: Enacting Temporal Elasticity Presenter: Lisa Harborth; U. of Hamburg Organizational Resilience as a Function of Emergent Coordination: The Integration of Critical Care i Presenter: McKenzie Lloyd-Smith; Bayes Business School (formerly Cass) A Cornerstone of Organizational Resilience: Balancing Formal and Informal Practices During Crisis Presenter: Tuna Cem Hayirli; Harvard Business School Presenter: Masha Kuznetsova; - Presenter: Paul Biddinger; Harvard Medical School Presenter: Elizabeth Bambury; Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health Presenter: Mariam Krikorian Atkinson; Harvard U. Modes of Adjustment: There’s More Than One Way to Organize Resiliently Presenter: Brian Hilligoss; U. of Arizona Presenter: Jeff Larson; U. of Arizona Presenter: Alden Lai; New York U. Presenter: Elena Maria Wong; U. of Arizona Presenter: Matthew John DePuccio; Rush U.