225 Building towards organizational resilience and complexity leadership 6.4 Discussion This study examined how a multi-expertise blood-related organization has coped and adapted during the first one-and-a-half years of the COVID-19 pandemic and whether complexity leadership elements emerged during that time. Overall, Sanquin coped well. In line with Duchek’s model,5 excellent coping was attributed to the abilities of the organization to accept, have monetary and social resources (although staff was limited, staff was willing) and implement solutions. In fact, the pandemic was an opportunity window for the organization to showcase its expertise and benefit publicly and financially; hence, COVID-19 could be considered a “constructive crisis”13 for the organization. As highlighted in the literature, the ability to accept and implement solutions requires bricolage, using existing resources towards new problems, and improvisation, the ability to act spontaneously and intuitively and ad hoc in an emergent manner.14–16 Furthermore, coping links to the next stage of resilience, adaptation, as “coping with crises builds the foundation for reflection, learning, and change.”5 Our study found that Sanquin partially adapted, with many lessons learned, which included how the organization became more collaborative with a stronger collective identity than it was prior to the pandemic. However, organic collaborations stopped or were near stopping a year and a half into the pandemic. Respondents were lamenting the return to “business as usual” and even top management wondered how to continue this activated spirit. Arguably, the organization had to revert to a place of more “normalcy,” as an organization cannot be in a constant crisis mode, and the phase of the pandemic allowed for more stability.17 However, this “business as usual” describes a return to the precrisis status, which respondents found wanting. Some healthcare studies describe how the pandemic created favorable conditions for improvisation and innovation7 8 18 19 and for some organizations, COVID-19 was a “catalyst for change.”20 For Sanquin, COVID-19’s effects to “catalyze change” were less significant than the leadership changes and organizational restructuring that were occurring simultaneously. This result highlights Duchek’s framework, where power and responsibility are the driver for adaptation. Duchek describes the connection as such: “While crises can open ‘windows of opportunity’ for adaptation processes, crises alone do not automatically lead to learning and overall change. Organizations often generate new knowledge (‘lessons learned’) but fail to translate this knowledge into new behaviors. In this context, power and responsibility play an important role” (Duchek, p. 237, emphasis mine).5 Thus, through the lens of CLT, we realized that COVID-19’s impact on Sanquin was to change the dynamics of power relationships, shifting organizational struc-
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