215 Building towards organizational resilience and complexity leadership 6.1 Introduction The COVID-19 pandemic is a “wild card,” a volatile disruptive event that severely affects the human condition and is beyond the scope of human control.1 It can also be considered a “creeping crisis” which occurs after a long incubation period and continues “simmering” after the acute phase is over so that there “a seemingly permanent, epochal character, generating regular outbursts without reaching closure.”2 It is complex, due to the rich interconnectivity of things interacting and changing one another in unexpected and irreversible ways.3 Like a magnifying glass, the pandemic exposed the vulnerabilities of the healthcare sector and the need for resilience.4 Resilience is a multi-capability to anticipate, cope and adapt before, during and after crises. It comprises a multi-step process that builds on a set of an organization’s inward capabilities and routines.5 Two of these steps are coping (accepting the situation and developing solutions) and adaptation (reflecting, learning and changing).5 While the need for resilience within healthcare is not new,6 there is a resurgent call for healthcare organizations and systems to become resilient during these uncertain times.7 8 As part of the resilience process, complexity leadership is required. Complexity leadership theory (CLT) is a framework to understand how to enable the adaptability of people and organizations by assessing the social (and dynamic) interactions that occur within an organization. As pressures occur, the system must change. There is an emphasis on “enabling” leaders who foster adaptive spaces; adaptive spaces are where processes of conflict, connection and reintegration occur between those who have an “order” response (operational leaders), and those who have an “adaptive” response (entrepreneurial leaders). The role of complexity leaders is to keep the system from staying in order by enabling adaptive responses.3 9 Prior to the pandemic, we became interested in organizational resilience related to what a traditionally-run Dutch blood bank needed to do or become to thrive into future uncertainties within transfusion medicine and healthcare at large. We found that “disruptive events” formed an important but highly uncertain topic that would impact blood demand.10 Therefore, when this organization (the Sanquin Blood Supply Foundation) quickly began various initiatives in response to the pandemic, it was an opportunity to link our prior results to the present circumstances and conduct a one-and-a-half-year observational study of the impact of this disruptive event on the organization and its resulting organizational changes. Therefore, our research aims were to: 1. Examine how Sanquin coped and adapted during the pandemic as part of its organizational resilience process.
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