Organizational resilience in SMEs and mid-sized companies

Building organizational resilience before you need it. The conditions for remaining able to act

Abstract

Organizational resilience is often reduced to the ability to hold out during a crisis and then return to normal. Recent literature offers a broader reading: a capability that is built over time, that draws on anticipation as much as reaction, and that enables the organization to adapt when its operating conditions change.

This note draws on the work of Duchek (2020), Hillmann & Guenther (2021), Lengnick-Hall et al. (2011), Hollnagel et al. (2011) and Weick & Sutcliffe (2007), and offers a reading of it adapted to SMEs and mid-sized companies.

At Orvelan, we define organizational resilience as:

an organization's ability to retain its freedom of action when conditions change significantly.

This ability can grow out of the experience of a crisis. It can also be built in advance: by identifying dependencies, preparing, distributing the capacity to act, and rebuilding headroom. But we can only build what we can see. This is why we regard organizational legibility not as one dimension of resilience, but as the condition for building it.

Finally, resilience and seizing opportunities are not the same thing. Yet the capabilities that make it possible to absorb a shock are often the same ones that make it possible to say yes to a period of acceleration.

Keywords: organizational resilience, SMEs, mid-sized companies, organizational legibility, critical human dependencies, organizational capacity, absorption capacity, organizational headroom, leader's room for manoeuvre, anticipation, adaptation.

Status of this text: an applied research note. The framework presented was developed by Orvelan on the basis of the literature and of observation of SMEs and mid-sized companies. It is not a validated measurement scale.

1. Introduction

For a long time, organizational resilience was summed up in a simple image: an organization suffers a shock, absorbs its consequences, then returns to satisfactory functioning.

This image remains accurate. It is simply incomplete.

Management research has shifted the focus. Resilience can be studied as an outcome, as a process or as a set of capabilities (Duchek, 2020). It manifests itself during and after a crisis — but some of its conditions exist, and are built, before the disruption occurs.

For SMEs and mid-sized companies, this shift changes a great deal.

In these organizations, vulnerability rarely stems from a lack of competence or a poor strategy. It arises from ordinary features of how they work: decisions that all go back up to the same place, a few people on whom everything depends, knowledge that has never been written down, interfaces held together by human adjustments, stretched resources, a leader absorbed by day-to-day operations.

These weaknesses become visible in particular when an SME crosses an organizational threshold: the way of working based on proximity, mutual familiarity and informal adjustments that had until then underpinned its agility gradually becomes insufficient as dependencies and interfaces multiply.

When the environment is stable, these features remain almost invisible. They are often even mistaken for efficiency. When conditions change, they become decisive.

The useful question is therefore not only:

Will the company withstand the next shock?

It is rather:

When its operating conditions change, will the Organization still have enough capacity to act in order to decide, reorganise and protect what needs protecting?

This is the question we explore here.

2. A rich concept, still not fully settled

Hillmann & Guenther (2021) conducted a systematic review of 126 references on organizational resilience. Their conclusion is clear: the concept has become established in management research, but it is still marked by a wide variety of definitions — 71 explicit definitions, drawing on 22 different attributes — and by real measurement difficulties.

The authors also point to boundary problems with neighbouring concepts: organizational flexibility, change capacity, adaptive capacity, and the capacity to protect oneself from disruption. And they note that there is not yet any consensus on the constituent dimensions of resilience, nor on how to measure them.

This is a limitation for research. It is also a lesson for practice: resilience cannot be reduced to a single score, nor to a universal list of characteristics.

For an SME or mid-sized company, the issue is therefore not whether it is “resilient” or not. It is to understand which capabilities would enable it to keep acting on the day its usual way of working is no longer enough.

3. Resilience exists before, during and after disruption

3.1 Duchek: anticipating, coping, adapting

Stephanie Duchek (2020) proposes conceiving of resilience as an organizational meta-capability, made up of complementary capabilities mobilised in three successive stages:

• anticipation: observing, identifying critical developments, preparing;
• coping: accepting the problem, developing and implementing solutions;
• adaptation: reflecting, learning, changing.

Her contribution is decisive: resilience does not begin when the crisis breaks out. For Duchek, resilient organizations do not respond only to the past or the present. They also act with a view to the future.

In this respect she takes up the notion of resilience potential proposed by Somers (2009): a resilience that exists in latent form before it is actually mobilised. Anticipation builds this potential. Coping and adapting make it possible to realise it.

This distinction reveals two paths to resilience:

The first is experiential:

disruption → response → learning → adaptation.

The organization becomes more resilient because it has gone through an ordeal, discovered some of its weaknesses and changed the way it works.

The second is anticipatory:

observation → identification of weaknesses → preparation → capability development.

The organization strengthens its potential before an event forces it to do so.

Finally, Duchek identifies four conditions that foster these capabilities, which she formulates as propositions to be tested:

• the organization's knowledge base,
• resource availability, social resources, and
• power based on expertise rather than hierarchical position, with shared responsibilities.

For Orvelan, this point is particularly important in SMEs: when all decisions go back up to the leader, this concentration can reduce the organization's capacity to act. This reading is central. A company does not need to wait for a crisis to discover its weaknesses. It can choose to look at them beforehand.

3.2 Hollnagel: deliberately building capabilities

Resilience engineering, whose work is brought together in particular by Hollnagel, Pariès, Woods and Wreathall (2011), points in the same direction. It identifies four essential capabilities:

• responding to what happens;
• monitoring what is critical;
• anticipating threats, but also opportunities;
• learning from experience, from failures as well as successes.

The benefit is concrete: resilience ceases to be an abstract quality. It becomes a set of capabilities that can be examined — and developed.

It no longer consists in hoping that the organization “will manage somehow”. It consists in deliberately building the conditions that will help it respond on the day an unusual situation arises.

3.3 Lengnick-Hall: a resilience that is also human and cognitive

Lengnick-Hall, Beck & Lengnick-Hall (2011) also regard resilience as a capability that is built — and, importantly, one that can be developed through human resource management.

They distinguish three components:

• cognitive,
• behavioural and
• contextual.

Together, they enable people and the Organization to respond to severe, unstable or unexpected situations.

For SMEs and mid-sized companies, the consequence is direct. Resilience does not depend only on business continuity plans, procedures or technical systems. It depends on how the organization understands what is happening to it, circulates information, mobilises its skills — and allows the right people to act.

4. Seeing the unexpected before it becomes unmanageable

Weick & Sutcliffe (2007) studied high-reliability organizations: those that operate in complex environments where a small failure can have serious consequences. Some are better than others at preventing an unexpected event from spiralling out of control.

The authors identify five principles:

• preoccupation with failure, even minor failure;
• reluctance to simplify interpretations;
• sensitivity to actual operations;
• commitment to resilience; and
• deference to the relevant expertise, wherever it lies, when the situation requires it.

One idea follows from this: an organization becomes vulnerable when it no longer sees properly what is happening within it.

In SMEs, this risk takes a particular form. When the leader holds most of the information, arbitration and interpretation, the organization gains speed and benefits from the leader's experience. But this concentration can become a dependency. And if the leader is overloaded, it is the interpretive capacity of the whole Organization that deteriorates — precisely when it is most needed.

The challenge is therefore not only to have more information. It is to develop a collective ability to spot important signals, to distinguish a useful anomaly from noise, and to mobilise the available expertise.

5. Orvelan's proposition: preserving freedom of action

These works converge on several points. Resilience is multidimensional. It rests on capabilities that are built over time. It does not manifest itself only after the event: it has an anticipatory dimension. And it draws as much on the formal organization as on behaviours, knowledge, relationships and the way decisions are made.

They do not, however, provide a single operational definition, nor a validated model that can be applied as it stands to SMEs and mid-sized companies. Duchek herself stresses that little is yet known about how resilience is actually built. Hillmann & Guenther emphasise the persistent difficulties of conceptualisation and measurement.

It is in this space that Orvelan positions its approach. We define Organizational resilience as:

an organization's ability to retain its freedom of action when conditions change significantly.

Retaining freedom of action does not mean maintaining the usual way of working at all costs. A resilient company may have to slow down certain activities, temporarily give up an objective, shift resources or accept a controlled decline in certain areas of performance.

The point lies elsewhere: keeping enough capability to understand, decide, arbitrate, reallocate, protect and adapt.

Resilience is therefore not the absence of weakness. It is the ability to prevent a weakness from abruptly depriving the Organization of any room for choice

6. Legibility as a precondition

This definition raises a simple question. How can a company strengthen its resilience if it does not clearly see its own dependencies?

An organization can appear solid while resting on fragile balances:

• one person alone holds critical knowledge;
• a function holds together thanks to an informal relationship;
• the leader arbitrates almost every important decision;
• a manager silently absorbs the dysfunctions between two departments;
• years of steady growth have quietly used up all the headroom.

As long as the environment remains stable, these dependencies are indistinguishable from efficiency. The problem appears when conditions change.

At Orvelan, we therefore distinguish between organizational legibility and organizational resilience. Legibility is not one more component of resilience. It is the condition that makes it possible to build resilience deliberately.

This is our own proposition. The literature focuses mainly on observing the environment and on sensemaking in the face of the unexpected. We turn the same lens inwards: towards how the organization actually works, as it is, and not as it is described.

We can only secure the dependencies we have identified. We can only rebuild headroom where we have understood that it has disappeared.

The literature extensively examines the organization's ability to read what is changing around it. Orvelan asks a complementary question: is the organization legible enough to itself to know where this change is likely to catch it out?

A legible organization is not automatically resilient. But it has a more honest view of its strengths, weaknesses and dependencies. It can then decide what it wants to secure, accept or transform.

See before preparing. Prepare before having to act.

7. Resilience and opportunity: a boundary to be clarified

In an article on organizational resilience, Orvelan puts forward a deliberately provocative idea: an organization prepared to absorb the unexpected is also better positioned to seize certain opportunities.

This idea needs to be stated precisely.

Seizing an opportunity is not, in itself, a definition of resilience. Duchek explicitly distinguishes resilience from flexibility and agility, which are useful for everyday adjustments, whereas resilience comes into play in the face of unexpected threats and crises. In their final integrative model, Hillmann & Guenther place growth and learning outside the concept, as consequences of resilience rather than components of it. Conversely, Lengnick-Hall et al. (2011) include in it the capacity to capitalise on disruptive surprises. The boundary therefore remains a matter of debate.

But some opportunities place the organization under strain very similar to that of a crisis:

• a strategic customer offers to double volumes;
• an acquisition becomes possible;
• an international market opens up faster than expected;
• a technology suddenly reshuffles the competitive landscape.

The event appears positive. But it requires making decisions quickly, shifting resources, mobilising new skills — while protecting what already works.

The opportunity then acts as a positive stress test. And the same weaknesses emerge: concentrated decisions, unavailable skills, human dependencies, fragile interfaces, missing headroom, an overloaded leader.

It is in this sense that Orvelan stands by the idea in the in-depth article:

Resilience is not only about limiting what the company could lose. It also widens the space in which it can choose to act.

A company that has organizational headroom can say yes to an opportunity without jeopardising what it has already built.

8. From theory to the Orvelan analytical framework

The literature does not currently offer a single, undisputed scale for measuring organizational resilience. Hillmann & Guenther analyse fourteen existing scales and highlight their limitations in terms of validity and construction.

Orvelan therefore does not present its framework as a validated academic scale. It is an operational analytical framework, built on the literature, on the observation of organizations and on the specific issues facing SMEs and mid-sized companies.

In its current working version, it examines six dimensions. Each asks a simple question and draws on identified research.

The Orvelan organizational resilience framework examines six dimensions: decision-making continuity, critical human dependencies, vital functions and tacit knowledge, absorption and reallocation capacity, robustness of interfaces and the leader's room for manoeuvre.

These dimensions do not scientifically demonstrate resilience. They express, provisionally, the question Orvelan is interested in:

where is an organization at risk of losing its capacity to act when its operating conditions change?

The number, scope and wording of these dimensions may change. The conceptual framework, however, does not depend on the tool: it can remain valid even if the diagnostic changes.

9. Resilience and the leader's room for manoeuvre

In an SME, the resilience of the organization and the position of its leader are hard to separate. The leader is often at once the person who decides, who holds critical information, who arbitrates between functions, who carries external relationships and who is accountable for the company's trajectory.

This centrality is a strength. It becomes a vulnerability when the organization can no longer function without the leader's constant involvement.

It also has a human cost. According to the study Vaincre les solitudes du dirigeant [Overcoming the loneliness of business leaders] by Bpifrance Le Lab (2016), only one in four SME and mid-sized company leaders say they feel supported; 45% feel isolated. Ten years later, this feeling has intensified: 49% of leaders feel isolated, including 18% who feel very isolated, compared with 11% in 2016 (Bpifrance Le Lab, 2026).

Torrès, Benzari, Swalhi & Thurik (2021) studied the risk of burnout among SME owner-managers during the COVID-19 crisis. They observe a change in its structure: during lockdown, feelings of helplessness and of being trapped come to the fore. The authors propose the notion of impediment exhaustion (épuisement d'empêchement) — the exhaustion of the leader who is worn out not by doing too much, but by being unable to act.

This research concerns an external impediment: the pandemic and lockdown.

Orvelan puts forward a distinct hypothesis. A comparable mechanism could arise when the impediment becomes organizational. The leader sees what needs to be done. But the organization no longer has the skills, headroom, relays or absorption capacity needed to act without putting the rest under strain.

The leader sees. But cannot act.

We do not present this relationship as demonstrated by this research. It is a practitioner's hypothesis, arising from setting that research against situations observed in SMEs. It deserves to be tested.

It nevertheless highlights the importance of an often overlooked dimension: the leader's room for manoeuvre is both a resource for the company's resilience and one of its possible outcomes.

An organization that distributes its decisions better, secures its dependencies and develops autonomous capabilities reduces its leader's position as “sole guarantor”. It gives the leader back time, perspective and the capacity to arbitrate. It allows the leader to steer from a place of clarity rather than survival.

10. A dynamic model: see, prepare, absorb, learn

The reading proposed by Orvelan describes not a state but a loop. It extends Duchek's three stages — which already include a feedback loop from learning to anticipation — by adding, upstream, a phase of observation directed towards the inside of the organization.

The Orvelan model describes organizational resilience as a dynamic loop: seeing the organization as it actually works, preparing the necessary capabilities, absorbing and reconfiguring when conditions change, then feeding the lessons back into the Organization's understanding of itself.

10.1 See

The organization first gains an accurate understanding of how it actually works. Where are the dependencies? Where is headroom lacking? Who is silently compensating? Which decisions are too concentrated? Which knowledge and which relationships would be hard to replace? This is the role of legibility.

10.2 Prepare

The company then decides which weaknesses to address and which dependencies to accept. It develops its resilience potential: distributing certain decisions, passing on critical knowledge, creating alternatives to major dependencies, developing skills, clarifying interfaces, rebuilding headroom. This stage corresponds to the anticipation described by Duchek and by resilience engineering.

10.3 Absorb and reconfigure

When conditions really do change, the capabilities that have been built are mobilised. The organization does not try to function exactly as before. It protects what is essential and changes what needs to change. This is where resilience becomes visible.

10.4 Learn

Every disruption, adaptation or acceleration reveals something about the organization. Certain weaknesses come to light. Certain capabilities prove more robust than expected. Certain practices become obsolete. These lessons must be fed back into the organization's understanding of itself.

The loop then returns to its starting point: seeing again.

See → Prepare → Absorb and reconfigure → Learn → See again.

11. Implications for SMEs and mid-sized companies

Work on resilience outside of crises. An organization can strengthen its resilience potential even when no major disruption is under way. Indeed, that is when it has the most freedom to do so.

Distinguish between dependencies rather than eliminating them. Eliminating all dependencies would be unrealistic, and probably counterproductive. The point is to identify those that could abruptly deprive the company of its capacity to act.

Accept that efficiency and resilience are not always aligned. An organization that is highly optimised for its usual way of working may gradually eliminate the redundancies, spare time, alternatives and unused capacity that would enable it to adapt. Duchek points out that the question is not whether to eliminate redundancy, but at what point its cost outweighs its benefits.

Look beyond processes. Resilience also depends on the circulation of knowledge, skills, relationships and interfaces — and on people's ability to make decisions at the right level.

Think of resilience as a strategic capability, not just as protection. When circumstances change, an organization that has headroom keeps its options open

12. Conclusion

Research on organizational resilience has made considerable progress. It has moved beyond the mere idea of returning to a previous state to take an interest in anticipation, organizational capabilities, adaptation and learning. Yet it remains a field under construction, marked by a plurality of definitions and by persistent measurement difficulties.

Orvelan does not seek to propose a new universal academic definition. Our aim is simpler: to translate this research into a question that is directly useful to the leaders of SMEs and mid-sized companies.

Will the organization retain enough freedom of action when conditions change?

This freedom of action does not arise at the moment of the shock. It is built. It can draw on past crises, but also on anticipation. And anticipation first requires seeing the organization as it actually works.

This is why, in the Orvelan approach, legibility comes before resilience. Seeing the dependencies. Understanding the weaknesses. Spotting the headroom that has disappeared. Then deciding which ones to secure.

Resilience then becomes less a promise of resistance than a capability maintained over time: the capability to keep choosing when circumstances no longer allow business as usual.

And when the unexpected takes the form not of a crisis but of an opportunity, it is also what spares the company from having to choose between what it could become and what it has already built.

References

Bpifrance Le Lab (2016). Vaincre les solitudes du dirigeant [Overcoming the loneliness of business leaders]. Bpifrance.

Bpifrance Le Lab (2026). Le nouveau visage de la solitude des dirigeants de PME : entre incertitudes et quête de sens [The new face of SME leaders' loneliness: between uncertainty and the search for meaning]. Bpifrance.

Duchek, S. (2020). Organizational resilience: a capability-based conceptualization. Business Research, 13(1), 215–246. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40685-019-0085-7

Hillmann, J., & Guenther, E. (2021). Organizational resilience: A valuable construct for management research? International Journal of Management Reviews, 23(1), 7–44. https://doi.org/10.1111/ijmr.12239

Hollnagel, E., Pariès, J., Woods, D. D., & Wreathall, J. (Eds.). (2011). Resilience Engineering in Practice: A Guidebook. Ashgate.

Lengnick-Hall, C. A., Beck, T. E., & Lengnick-Hall, M. L. (2011). Developing a capacity for organizational resilience through strategic human resource management. Human Resource Management Review, 21(3), 243–255. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.hrmr.2010.07.001

Somers, S. (2009). Measuring resilience potential: An adaptive strategy for organizational crisis planning. Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management, 17(1), 12–23.

Torrès, O., Benzari, A., Swalhi, A., & Thurik, R. (2021). Confinement et risque de burnout des dirigeants propriétaires de PME : le syndrome d'épuisement d'empêchement [Lockdown and burnout risk among SME owner-managers: the impediment exhaustion syndrome]. Revue internationale P.M.E., 34(2), 62–80. https://doi.org/10.7202/1079188ar

Weick, K. E., & Sutcliffe, K. M. (2007). Managing the Unexpected

© Orvelan 2026 · See what is solid. Decide wisely. Go far.

David Martinez (ENG)

Founder Orvelan

David Martinez is the founder of Orvelan. After 25 years of observing and transforming organizations from the inside, across international groups, high-growth environments and periods of major change, he now helps SME and mid-sized company leaders better understand how their organizations really work, so they can make clearer decisions. See what is solid. Decide with clarity. Go further.