Literature on organizational and supply chain resilience has increased vis-à-vis the heightened challenges recently faced by enterprises, e.g. financial crisis. Various facets of resilience have been highlighted, including the resources and dynamic competences required, strategies pursued or action repertoires in response to disruptions. However, insights into how firms reconfigure resources and develop competitiveness in pursuit of resilience are limited. This knowledge contributes towards understanding how resilience could be increased through combining various dynamic capabilities (e.g. flexibility, robustness, agility, leanness) along established resilience phases (readiness, sensing, response, recovery).

This paper explores how an existing RALF (Robustness, Agility, Leanness, Flexibility) resilience framework, based on a dynamic capability approach, can be used by firms to deal with disruptions. A multiple case approach is employed in order to examine this phenomenon from both a temporal perspective (over two crises in Firm A) and spatial perspective (over one crisis in Firm B, taking a supply chain approach), while establishing the relationship with economic resilience through the Altman’s Z-score.

The paper advocates the creation of a new resilience ‘recipe’, seen as a dynamic function of various capabilities, along the four resilience phases. While Case A had low resilience in the 1990-93 financial downturn, we show that its RALF capabilities were much higher following the 2008 crisis. Also in 2008, we show that Case B created a high degree of readiness, and ultimately resilience, through RALF despite the lack of resilience of its primary supplier.