How Learning Supports the Development of Proactive Resilience: Lessons from a Systematic Literature Review

Recent management literature indicates a growing interest in proactive resilience (Duchek, 2020), which pertains to the short-term management of adverse events, specifically while they are incubating or immediately after they occur (Duchek, 2020; Hillmann and Guenther, 2021). Grounded in the management of complex, ambiguous, and/or unpredictable situations and the inherent uncertainty within them, proactive resilience relies on individuals' capacity, both individually and collectively, to comprehend the unfolding situation and provide appropriate responses that are not entirely predetermined (Williams et al., 2017; Hillmann and Guenther, 2021; Rouby et al., 2023). Developing proactive resilience is particularly crucial in the face of adverse events (Sadri et al., 2018; Sanchez et al., 1995), such as natural or human-caused disasters (Baker et al., 2013; Broughton, 2005). If not contained, these events can rapidly escalate, resulting in crises that are challenging to manage in the long term, underscoring the significance of their short-term management. Coping with the inherent uncertainty of complex, ambiguous, and unpredictable situations poses a genuine challenge (Sutcliffe et al., 2016; Levinthal and Rerup, 2021), for which individuals must be prepared (Raetze et al., 2022). Put another way, preparedness, which means preparing individuals to cope with adversity when the time comes, i.e., to cope with uncertainty when managing the adverse event in the short term, becomes a key challenge (Duchek, 2020). Consequently, learning becomes essential for the development of proactive resilience (Sutcliffe and Vogus, 2003; Tasic et al., 2020; Young et al., 2022). Yet, the specific link between learning and proactive resilience through the roles, challenges, obstacles, and/or levers associated with it, or even the concrete modalities of implementing learning, remains largely underexplored (Hillmann and Guenther, 2021; Hepfer and Laurence, 2022). Before delving further into this exploration, it seems important to review the current state of the literature on the topic to identify both its main contributions and limitations, in order to suggest a research agenda to advance the topic.