Confronted with unprecedented crises like COVID-19, organisations must develop transformative capabilities— the ability to strategically adapt to external changes and create innovative behaviour and new ways of doing things. This project explores the idea that responding to external pressures, particularly in a crisis, is essentially an epistemological problem, a matter of how organisations incorporate inquiry, learning, unlearning and knowledge-making in their modus operandi. To this end, we develop a theoretical model based on a situated learning perspective, drawing on insights from research on transformative capabilities and critical thinking epistemologies to conduct three lines of inquiry to understand how organisations respond when routines are disrupted, and how they either reconfigure or create new routines, and how they embed these new routines in post crisis contexts. This situated, inquiry-based approach promises a better understanding of how transformative capabilities and the collaborative creation of knowledge shape routines and the resilience of organisations.
Project led by A/Professor Yunxia Zhu, UQ Business School.
