Crisis Leadership and Organizational Resilience: A Post-Pandemic Analysis of Adaptation and Collapse

The COVID-19 pandemic exposed differences in how organizations interpreted threats, reconfigured operations, and managed competing strategic priorities. This conceptual paper develops the Sense-Adapt-Navigate (SAN) Framework, integrating organizational sensemaking, dynamic capabilities, and paradox theory. Sensing refers to the interpretation of ambiguous signals and the development of shared understanding; Adapting concerns the reconfiguration of resources and operating practices; and Navigating concerns persistent tensions, including control versus flexibility and short-term survival versus long-term viability. The capacities are proposed to interact through iterative feedback rather than unfold as a fixed sequence. We illustrate their potential relevance through secondary-source accounts of Zoom Video Communications and Hertz Global Holdings, which experienced substantially different pandemic-era pressures and outcomes. Zoom expanded rapidly while confronting scale and security problems; Hertz filed for Chapter 11 protection in May 2020 and completed its restructuring in June 2021. Descriptive evidence from a survey of over 5,800 U.S. small businesses contextualizes the shock, but it does not measure SAN capacities or validate the model. The paper offers testable propositions and managerial implications while acknowledging that industry exposure, liquidity, policy support, and other contextual factors constrain organizational responses. Future comparative and longitudinal research is needed to assess the framework’s explanatory and predictive value.