Continuing a Civic Service, 1939–1945

Crises are highly disruptive phenomena that defy the expectations of stakeholders and threaten a museum’s central aims and objectives. Their resolution usually involves drawing on long-developed or quickly established resilience, an organisational quality introduced in Chap. 2 . The current chapter uses the case of the Imperial War Museum during the Second World War and its work maintaining a civic service to explore the interplay between crisis management and resilience. The chapter expands on the concept of resilience and shows how organisational resilience underlies all successful crisis management activities.