Resilience leadership judgment: Findings from a cosmology episode study of the shootdown of Flight MH17

Researchers in the tightly enmeshed disciplines of leadership, strategy, organizations, and management have long found it helpful to test their theories through variable-based, process-based, and episode-based studies of organizational resilience in extreme enacted environments, such as wildland firefighting, high-altitude mountaineering, and special warfare operations. One of the foundational tools in the study of organizational resilience is cosmology episode studies, the rigorous analysis of the complex processes that take place before, during, and after a perturbation, disruption, crisis, disaster, or catastrophe. This cosmology episode study of the 17 July 2014 shootdown by pro-Russian separatists in Ukraine of Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 (MH17) helps expand resilience leadership judgment from a simple three-phase model (before, during, after) to a more accurate five-phase model (anticipating, sense-losing, improvising, sense-remaking, renewing). More specifically, anticipating takes place before a potential catastrophe, sense-losing occurs in response to the appearance of a catastrophe, improvising generates potential solutions in the critical liminal period of a catastrophe, sense-remaking enacts a path out of the catastrophe, and renewing takes place after a catastrophe.