Learning From Chaos. Suggestions for Hospitals Under Extraordinary Stress

Considered as an exogenous and continuous shock characterized by great difficulty in descriptive terms, COVID-19 management required out of the ordinary organizational approaches for hospitals. This paper aims to highlight the resilience factors than can curb or accelerate the rebooting phase of the resilient process for hospitals under COVID-19 stress. Resilience is here considered as a multilevel, multidimensional, and dynamic construct mainly composed of three characteristics: robustness, redundancy, resourcefulness. Technology resulted as an activator of change working as a booster in the rebooting phase. By leveraging on the concept of learning ambidexterity, hospitals made choices between exploitation and exploration-oriented activities. In this direction, it was found that it is necessary to acquire and develop crisis management skills as the existing pre-pandemic ones proved unable to cover a wide range of not linear issues such as those brought about by COVID-19.