Organizational resilience and adaptation: A post-Katrina case study

Recently public health has become more focused on preparedness, mainly concentrated on redundancy and having the ability to respond to emergencies. However, there has not been much focus on the transformative effect of a major event, such as Hurricane Katrina, and how organizations change, both voluntarily and involuntarily, in response to the event. Organizations may need to completely shift focus and structure to remain useful when the landscape has changed.

Resilience and adaptation, given attention in other disciplines, is an overlooked concept in public health. Individuals' and organizations' responses to change may be mutually informative. Both entities must adapt to survive after major events. Organizations cannot help but be changed by the same things that individuals view as transformative events. Not responding to this change may cause the organization to become obsolete. In preparedness planning, public health organizations must look beyond the event itself, not just in terms of protecting the public, but protecting the organizations themselves. This adaptation may be easier for smaller organizations. Examples of organizations that have adapted to survive beyond Katrina will be shared. The fact that the whole city of New Orleans is going through this transformation provides social support of some degree.

In the case of major events, resilience requires not resuming one's original shape or position, but rather transforming oneself, as the landscape and environment in which one used to function has been very much transformed as well. This concept of resilience and adaptation applies to individuals and organizations.