Measuring Resilience Potential: An Adaptive Strategy for Organizational Crisis Planning

There are questions as to whether a causal relationship exists between crisis planning and effective adaptive behaviors in crisis. Traditional planning has viewed the crisis plan as an outcome of a process to be utilized in a step-by-step fashion during a crisis. This article challenges this orthodox view and suggests a new paradigm, one that focuses on creating organizational structures and processes that build organizational resilience potential. The objective is to develop a scale to measure latent resilience in organizations. This exploratory research begins to build a critical foundation of knowledge with which to consider whether a move towards a new paradigm in disaster planning – one based on building organizational resilience potential – should be the focus of future research.