The concept of organizational resilience has evolved from focusing on defensive and adaptive resilience approaches—which center on crisis recovery, risk mitigation and reactive adaptation to threat—to emphasizing enactive resilience approaches involving the pursuit of opportunities. Focusing on opportunities enables organizations to not only survive but also thrive in uncertain environments. However, an important research gap remains in understanding how organizations can develop their resilience capacity—the cognitive, behavioral, and contextual capabilities through which resilience manifests—to overcome path dependence and pursue developments, or affordances, in the environment as opportunities before they develop into threats. This paper examines a company that, despite having a threat orientation and a resilience capacity conducive to defensive and adaptive resilience approaches, was able to overcome path dependence and pursue opportunity. Findings show how the initial interpretation and framing of an affordance as opportunity ensures top management commitment and involvement in its pursuit. The nature of signals relating to what the potential event can afford for the organization, the context in which it is sensed, and to whom signals emerge, are instrumental in this regard. In addition to initial interpretation, framing, and top management commitment and involvement, prospective sensemaking and collective framing processes are shown to be important mechanisms for identifying and developing lacking resilience capacity components. This study contributes to resilience and management literature by elucidating the “black box” of resilience, illustrating how organizations can initiate shifts in resilience capacity and break free from path dependence.
