Case study in adaptive strategy: Supporting global organizations through COVID-19
The COVID-19 pandemic was not just a health crisis, it was a multi-layered operational disruption that tested the resilience of organizations worldwide. Over the course of the initial outbreak and through the waves that followed, I had the opportunity to support more than half a dozen global organizations, each with distinct footprints, missions, and risk profiles. The scale and diversity of needs made this both one of the most demanding and most illuminating periods of my professional practice.
Challenge #1: A global crisis with local variations
Each organization faced a uniquely uneven landscape. While some operated in countries with swift, centralized lockdowns, others had staff in regions with fragmented or delayed government guidance. A few had offices in jurisdictions with conflicting national and local directives.
One of the first challenges was helping leadership teams make sense of the geographic patchwork:
Mapping operational risk by location
Aligning travel policy with fast-changing government restrictions
Determining when and how to pause or adapt in-person activities across diverse settings
We developed adaptive playbooks that allowed for regional specificity without sacrificing organizational coherence.
Challenge #2: Global travel at a standstill
Many of the organizations I supported relied heavily on international travel to carry out their mission: monitoring field programs, conducting research, or coordinating with in-country partners. Virtually overnight, those pipelines were severed.
Key tasks included:
Assessing essential vs. deferrable travel
Reprioritizing operational goals that relied on physical presence
Supporting staff stranded abroad or needing emergency repatriation
Establishing interim remote communication workflows with field teams
Flexibility was critical. So was constant communication.
Challenge #3: Remote work readiness (or lack thereof)
The shift to work-from-home was relatively smooth for some organizations. For others, especially those with limited digital infrastructure at remote or resource-constrained sites, the pivot was far more complex.
We worked quickly to:
Identify critical path IT upgrades and communication gaps
Create minimum viable remote-work configurations where full connectivity wasn't possible
Establish guidance for supervisors to support distributed teams with varied capabilities
The goal wasn’t perfection, it was continuity. That required a realistic understanding of technical limits and a heavy dose of patience.
Challenge #4: Redefining "return to work"
As the initial emergency phase receded and the question of return-to-work emerged, we faced another layered problem: there was no single "normal" to return to.
We tackled this by helping leadership teams:
Re-evaluate the purpose and function of physical office space
Create phased return models tailored to site-specific conditions
Develop flexible policies that balanced health protocols with employee experience
Introduce hybrid work norms and re-negotiate expectations for collaboration, accountability, and wellbeing
What began as an operational challenge became a cultural one. Organizations had to define not just where people would work, but how they would work, and why.
Lessons that carried forward
Across these organizations, a few patterns emerged that continue to inform my work:
Resilience lives in flexibility, not rigidity
Information-sharing must be fast, frequent, and trusted
Human-centered policy wins in times of prolonged uncertainty
Global response requires local empathy
Conclusion: A crisis that rewrote the playbook
COVID-19 didn’t just challenge operational norms, it rewrote them. The organizations that adapted best weren’t the ones with the most elaborate plans, but the ones willing to rethink assumptions, listen to their people, and make incremental improvements under pressure.
This experience remains one of the most instructive in showing that resilience is not a destination; it is an evolving capacity, shaped by how well we learn, adapt, and lead through the unknown.
