Organizational Resilience: A model to understand crisis communications & management.

One of the most critical functions of a public relations or corporate communications department is crisis management. The erudite Mike Barger, Ph.D., the co-founder of JetBlue Airways, has taught me great insights into crisis leadership.

As Dr. Barger emphasizes, in the VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous) enterprise environment, corporate communicators and leaders need to manage the crisis with particular focuses on the following:

1. Stakeholders’ threatened value proposition and

2. The organization’s competency of resilience.

Organizational resilience is a concept that no one could explain better than Dr. Stephanie Duchek in her “Organizational Resilience: A Capability-Based Conceptualization.” In her own words, Dr. Duchek (2020) defines organizational resilience as "an organization’s ability to anticipate potential threats, cope effectively with adverse events, and adapt to changing conditions."

What makes her definition stand out is its transformation into a conceptualization model that serves as a framework for high-stakes decision-making. The so-called capability-based conceptualization model of organizational resilience is born.

(The infographic is my personal visualization of Dr. Duchek's organizational resilience model. To access the original model, please click here.)

Anticipation Capabilities

The first stage of organizational resilience refers to the capability to identify potential issues that may eventually become crisis-level incidents and to prepare proactively. While most crises do not announce their arrival, enterprises with anticipation capabilities see the to-be crisis faster than others and avoid the catastrophe. Effective anticipation requires the following:

• Observations through internal and external stakeholders to detect potential threats

• Mechanisms to prepare for crises without knowing when they will occur, such as a crisis communication plan

Coping Capabilities

The second stage of organizational resilience involves the capability to accept the concurrent crisis and resolve it. Enterprise leaders need to overcome the cognitive challenge to become denial-, nostalgia-, and arrogance-free. Only when leaders acknowledge that the enterprise is in the midst of a crisis, are they able to develop and implement specific solutions. The inclusion of stakeholders is valuable in both processes of accepting the crisis and successfully leaving the peak danger zone behind.

Adaptation Capabilities

The last stage of organizational resilience embraces the capability to pursue formal reflective practices, incorporate gained insights into the existing knowledge base, and generate changes from the knowledge. Reflection and learning processes need to articulate and analyze the problem, explain the problem through tentative theories, and conclude lessons. For corporate communication professionals specifically, this recovery stage is a critical time to restore the trust of all stakeholders by engaging with them in dialogue and invite them into the change process.

Never let a good crisis go to waste (Winston Churchill)

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Date published: September 30, 2021

Programs used: Word, Grammarly & Canva

Brief description: An overview of organizational resilience through a conceptualization model.

Reflection: This fourth blog of the series allowed me to visualize a profound model in communications and management into an infographic.

References:

Barger, M. (2021). High Stakes Leadership: Leading in Times of Crisis. Personal Collection of M. Barger, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor MI.

Duchek, S. (2020). Organizational resilience: a capability-based conceptualization. Bus Res 13, 215–246.