Flourishing against the odds: positive deviance case selection and formative influences timeline as methodological tools for tracing resilience in nonprofit organizations

Purpose This article advances methodological possibilities for studying organizational resilience by combining Positive Deviance Case Selection (PDCS) with the Formative Influences Timeline (FIT) methods. It responds to the need for approaches that can capture the complexity of resilience as a communicative and materially enacted process in times of crisis. Design/methodology/approach Drawing from a case study of Apex for Youth, a New York–based Asian American nonprofit that thrived after the COVID-19 pandemic, the article demonstrates how PDCS enables researchers to identify organizations that not only endured crisis but flourished under conditions of utter constraint. It also shows how FIT can be used to uncover how resilience is triggered, made sense of and enacted across time and roles. Unlike conventional interviews, FIT surfaces lived rhythms of decision-making, emotional labor and values-work that are often omitted from official accounts or managerialist frames. Findings Taken together, these methods reveal the distributed, embodied and co-constructed nature of resilience in mission-driven work. They illustrate how resilience unfolds not as a linear process but through overlapping and recursive responses to crisis, often shaped by personal commitments and ethical tensions. Originality/value By treating difference and reflexivity as generative of insight in both case selection and data collection, these approaches bridge the gap between research and practice. They offer textured, process and practice-centered perspectives into what holds organizations together when familiar structures fall away and contribute to methodologically imaginative research in organizational communication and resilience.