OCCUPATIONAL APPLICATIONSThe COVID-19 pandemic caused large organizations and institutions to adapt their decision-making procedures and hierarchical structures to address pandemic-specific concerns. By examining a large public university, we found that effective adaptation occurred through restructuring the decision-making processes, coordinating decisions between departments, and effective monitoring of prior decisions. When considering the COVID-19 pandemic as a fundamental surprise event, our work identified strategies and decision-making that both maintained and increased adaptive capacity through the course of such an event. Through this case study, we highlight decisions that can be made by similar large organizations, to increase adaptive capacity when they are faced with similar surprise events.
Keywords: Resilience; adaptive capacity; fundamental surprise; sociotechnical systems.
Background In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic caused significant disruptions for institutions of higher education around the world. In response to these disruptions, academic institutions adapted policies and standard operations to continue providing learning for students.Purpose We conducted a case study examining a large public university in the United States, wherein the COVID-19 pandemic had drastic effects on the university decision-making structure. We aimed to obtain insights into how a restructuring of this university’s decision-making hierarchy in response to the pandemic ultimately increased adaptive capacity.Methods We used semi-structured interviews of 11 participants to identify key areas of organizational adaptation and qualitative content analysis of these interviews to identify key themes within the data.Results Identified themes pertained to adaptations at multiple levels of organizational scale, including decision-making hierarchical structure, general preparedness for a fundamental surprise event, allocation of resources during the pandemic, and monitoring of policy effectiveness.Conclusions Results from our case study identify how a large public university adapted to the COVID-19 pandemic as a fundamental surprise event. These findings offer guidance for similar organizations to actualize adaptive capacity across different levels of scale.