Strategic resilience development: A study using Delphi

Abstract

Resilience in strategic perspective is related to a continuous organizational development, anticipating and adjusting to environment changes, fostering organizations with more capacity to bounce back from disturbance and thrive. This paper attempts to fill a gap in literature identifying critical factors that promote Strategic Resilience. First, the Strategic Resilience concept is reviewed using Contingency Theory and Organizational Development as theoretical lens. From this theoretical study was derived a set of 11 promoting factors Strategic Resilience. In a second stage, academics and experts in management field were consulted about the factors relevancy. The Delphi technique was used to guarantee a consensus of ideas from those specialists, allowing the topic discussion, but assuring anonymity. The results suggests the existence of 10 promoting Strategic Resilience factors, among them “Leadership” and “Capacity of change” achieved total unanimity among the experts, but “Robust strategy” and “Organizational structure” achieved the smallest consensus. This paper contributes to theory building by proposing factors that help organizations in strategic level to get preparedness, allowing the alignment of strategies, responding a crises situation and succeed.