ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on two crucial processes for surviving an organizational crisis, developing and being successful in the long run – resilience and learning. Resilience was first used in the natural sciences in the mid-19th century, as a way to measure the hardness and durability of materials. In the 1950s psychologists began to use the term, but it was only in the 1970s and 1980s that it was used in greater detail to describe people’s ability to recover from stress and stress situations. The research on the post-crisis phase contains many descriptions of how crises lead to rational values, wise insights and organizational development that, in its turn, will improve future crisis preparedness and management. Co-workers are central to successful crisis management. Resilient organizations are distinguished by a culture of attentiveness. Safety lies at the center of these organizations. High reliability organizations are resilient because they know and expect that crises will happen.
