How do societies and organizations manifest resilience in a crisis, and why are some more resilient than others? This question animates the Management and Organization Review’s Resilience Forum.

The starting point for the lingering new normal is that a former status quo – the state of the world prior to the crisis – may not be re-attainable. A severe pandemic has changed the frontiers of uncertainty to make many of the standard operating practices appear risky. But rather than build redundancy in global supply chains, this is an opportunity to rethink the ways in which we (over)use resources and assign or view costs. Such forward-looking resilience may benefit from dispersed and delegated initiative as Redding writes (this Forum) or invite balancing loose and tight coupling in new ways (Li, This Forum).

New societal expectations are emerging. Government competence is at stake as the consequences of political decisions are more concrete than ever. The dependent variable is stark: According to European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, 12 698 995 cases of COVID-19 have been reported, including 564 924 deaths between 31 December 2019 and as of 12 July 2020. Yet governments vary greatly in their performance and the lessons learned (Zhou, this Forum). It is important to acknowledge the problem rather than make deadly pretensions for cover-up. Knowledgeable decentralization and reasoning like a scientist (Grandori, This Forum) may help. One of the hopeful consequences of the crisis may be that knowledge is again respected as something that may make a difference to people’s lives.

The implications for research include the development of a conceptual understanding of resilience as something that is not a bounce back or staying within equilibrium limits but a dynamic and generative capability to cope with crises, both which are unexpected and for which we are unprepared, in ways that make organizations and societies stronger. Building on the Resilience Forum’s contributions, such a conceptualization of resilience will most likely involve an early and frank acknowledgement of emergent problems, research-based knowledge, science thinking in solution searching, local experimentation, learning from scarce experience and some trust in each other. A re-emergence of resilience will require a commitment to many rather than few as defenses to set the few apart may become increasingly hard to maintain, or justify. Resilience may also ask us to relate to our surrounding environment in less human-centric ways to avoid constant pandemics and other catastrophes that our societies can ill afford in succession.