Discovering Dynamic Resiliency in Organizations

Today, resilience is a hot topic and overcomes sector and scientific domains’ boundaries. For instance, EU co-funding programs are basically grounded on the understanding of building and managing resilient societies and smart cities. The need to face uncertainties and surroundings stimulates organizations to find new ways to react/pro-act/adapt to any event, highlighting resiliency. Recent advances in business literature, first within the organizational field, argue for new meanings and interpretations of resilience, both in terms of intriguing dichotomies like bouncing-forward versus bouncing-back, challenge-zone versus comfort-zone, resource-renewal versus resource-recovery, etc. Nevertheless, other relevant gaps deserve to be explored like Systems Thinking. This gives insights into resilience subjectivity and the resilient key-leverage aspects for the continuity and viability over time of any process. This conceptual paper links themes of dynamic capabilities in organizations using the method theory for a confirmatory approach to Systems Thinking. We highlight the dynamic dimension of organizational resilience and the modes of action used to evolve the way to be resilient. The findings can be established under the Systems Thinking framework regarding information variety and cognitive alignment, as well as several practical and managerial implications contributing to the on-going debate.