18 Chapter 1 collective sensemaking and coordination at the group-level, entailing vital traits as improvisation, communication, and quick implementation. Thus, an organization’s social resources are an important driver at this phase. The third stage of adaptation entails reflecting from the crisis, learning from it, and using it to catalyse change (and overcoming the resistance to it). However, an organization’s power dynamics and chains of responsibility directly influence whether change does occur. With every stage, the organization learns “from” and “through” the experience so that it feeds into its knowledge base feedback loop.27 1.6 Outline and contents of this thesis As the story of blood is one of metamorphosis, so has the journey of the research presented in this thesis been. It was originally intended to be a traditional scenario exercise in identifying the historical trends and transformational factors that would impact blood demand, to create specific scenarios for the medium and long-term future. As interesting as that would have been, it gradually morphed as the flow of circumstances changed. After much time spent on the identification of important drivers that would affect the future demand of RBCs (which, in retrospect, was Duchek’s first step of “anticipation” in the resilience framework), we found ourselves, at the end of the day, turning the focus inwards, into the organization. “If blood demand is going to change in this or that direction in 20- or 50-years’ time, what would Sanquin need to do to respond to that change?” I asked as one of the last questions in my interviews during the first two years of conducting this research. And this is where respondents, especially Sanquin employees, would become very attentive and articulate. Suddenly, the question was no longer on a theoretical level but on personal level regarding their daily experiences at work. As I compiled and compared the answers to this question, the overarching themes concerned organizational change, organizational innovation, and organizational resilience. Hence, it made sense to me to explore these themes further, still using scenario principles, so that the scope shifted from creating a set of specific scenarios to understanding and describing the many opportunities and threats of these transformational factors and the organizational implications for Sanquin instead. It shifted our lens from looking externally to looking internally. While conducting our internal analysis of the organization, the COVID-19 pandemic occurred. This again changed the course of our plans, but it enabled us to see one of our results, the possibility of a disruptive event bringing opportunities and threats, and observe and assess how the organization developed accordingly.
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