Facing the unexpected: a literature review on methods for assessing organizational adaptive capacity

Organizations may be confronted with both expected and unexpected events that challenge their abilities to provide these services uninterrupted. Traditional strategies based on anticipation and planning are primarily useful for expected events, but for unexpected events, organizations must develop capacities to adapt to situations and conditions not foreseen. As systems and societies are becoming more complex and unpredictable, adaptive capacities are becoming more important. To address these emerging challenges, organizations need access to methods for analyzing their adaptive capacities. This paper presents a literature review of existing methods for assessing adaptive capacity in organizations. The review identifies a range of methods that use different concepts, address different application domains, and have different analytical focus. More specifically, the review gives rise to the following key insights that can be used as a basis to further develop methods for more effective practical usefulness. First, methods need to be based on clear conceptual frameworks, which is often not the case today. Second, methods should explicitly account for the influences of multiple system levels and their interrelations. Third, methods need to target the underlying organizational conditions from which adaptive capacities emerge. Finally, from a practitioners point of view, there is a delicate balance between developing a comprehensive in-depth method and a more pragmatic method requiring less resources to apply While there is a need to encourage methodological pluralism, considering the complexity of organizational adaptive capacity, there is also an untapped potential to develop more holistic, unified and effective approaches.