Institutional Resilience: Leading Through Disruption with Purpose
13 June 2025
Wendy L. Guild, Ph.D., Co-Founder & Principal Consultant, ImpactMetrics, and former Vice Dean of MBA Programs, University of California, Berkeley, Haas School of Business examines how purpose can drive progress for universities in today’s challenging world.
Institutional Resilience: Leading Through Disruption with Purpose
Universities worldwide face unprecedented challenges. Research-intensive institutions with large endowments and significant international student populations are experiencing particular turbulence—from geopolitical tensions affecting global mobility to financial pressures reshaping higher education's landscape, especially in the US. Yet within these disruptions lies tremendous opportunity, especially as artificial intelligence transforms how we create, share, and apply knowledge. As business school and university leaders, we must ask ourselves: How do we not merely survive these disruptions, but emerge stronger and more aligned with our core mission?
Having spent my career in top public universities, each committed to excellence in research and teaching while expanding access for social mobility and economic growth, I've witnessed firsthand how institutions weather storms. The key lies not in defensive retrenchment, but in purpose-driven resilience that transforms challenges into opportunities for renewal and growth.
The Foundation of Institutional Resilience
Research on organizational resilience reveals that successful institutions maintain confidence in their fundamental mission while remaining adaptable to changing circumstances (Sutcliffe & Vogus, 2023). Building institutional resilience requires substantial resources, but more importantly, it demands clarity about what we stand for and why we exist.
The concept of purpose may seem abstract to many administrators, yet there is nothing more grounding than having a clear sense of intention for institutional actions. Research on purpose-driven leadership demonstrates that organizations anchored in authentic clear purpose consistently outperform those focused solely on metrics or competitive positioning (Gartenberg, et. al. 2019). When universities operate from a clear sense of purpose, every decision becomes a test of alignment rather than a reaction to external pressures.
A Framework for Purpose-Driven Decision Making
Using fundamental questions to create a creates a framework for institutional decision making during turbulent times can make a huge difference, as this approach moves us from a reactive to strategic mindset:
What are our options, and how would they be implemented? This grounds us in practical reality, forcing specificity over abstract planning.
Who should be involved, and how are stakeholders impacted? This expands our perspective beyond internal concerns to include students, faculty, community partners, and global collaborators.
Which option best serves our why—our institutional purpose? This crucial filter eliminates choices that might offer short-term relief but compromise long-term mission alignment.
When provides temporal context, recognizing that some moves that seem impossible now might become feasible later, while others require immediate action.
This framework prevents the threat rigidity response that plagues organizations under stress—the tendency to narrow focus, reduce information processing, and retreat into defensive positions (Staw et al., 1981). Instead, it keeps us expansive and strategic.
The Paradox of Opening During Crisis
Counter-intuitively, research on stress responses shows that reaching outward during challenging times builds resilience more effectively than turning inward. Studies on social support during organizational stress demonstrate that institutions maintaining external partnerships and collaborative relationships adapt more successfully to disruption than those that isolate (Taylor, 2011).
This aligns with what we observe in higher education: universities that embrace experimentation through partnerships often discover breakthrough innovations in both research and teaching. Science has been conducted collaboratively across national boundaries for years, with countries like Hong Kong (72% of research published with international partners), Switzerland (67%), Singapore (68%), and the UK (59%) leading in international scientific collaboration (World Economic Forum, 2024). In teaching, Executive MBA collaborations such as Kellogg-WHU, Columbia-LBS, and TRIUM (NYU Stern, LSE, HEC Paris) demonstrate how institutional partnerships create educational models that serve global executives in ways no single institution could achieve alone. Similarly, the explosive growth of specialized master's programs over the past two decades and the rapid adoption of technology-enabled online delivery show how institutions that embraced experimentation expanded their global reach and accessibility.
However, partnerships and new strategies bring complexity—governance challenges, resource coordination, and potential mission drift. The key lies in maintaining clear purpose as the organizing principle. When partnerships and new initiatives align with institutional mission and undergo rigorous evaluation, they become powerful tools for innovation rather than sources of distraction.
Maintaining Confidence in Fundamentals
Successful adaptation during crisis requires maintaining absolute confidence in our institutional fundamentals—our research excellence, teaching quality, and commitment to developing leaders who create positive impact. This confidence should be grounded in our demonstrated track record: universities generate extraordinary returns on investment, with research producing breakthrough discoveries that drive economic growth, graduates founding companies that create millions of jobs, and professional networks that continue generating value decades after graduation (Valero & Van Reenen, 2019).
When university leaders maintain unwavering belief in these core strengths while remaining flexible about delivery methods, partnership structures, and resource allocation, they create space for innovation. The question isn't whether our research matters or whether our graduates create value—it's how we can amplify these contributions through new collaborations and creative approaches.
Moving Forward with Purpose
As we navigate current disruptions, university leaders must resist the temptation to retreat into defensive strategies that may compromise our long-term mission. Instead, we should redirect resources toward activities that best support our purpose of excellence in research and teaching, doing so in collaboration with carefully selected partners worldwide who share our commitment to developing talent and discovering knowledge that drives prosperity.
The institutions that emerge strongest from today's challenges will be those that maintained their commitment to purpose while thoughtfully expanding their capacity for collaboration. They will be the universities that transformed disruption into opportunity—not by abandoning their mission, but by finding innovative ways to fulfill it more completely. This requires courage to reach outward, wisdom to evaluate partnerships carefully, and unwavering confidence in the transformational power of higher education.
References
Gartenberg, C., Prat, A. & Serafeim, G. (2019). Corporate Purpose and Financial Performance. Organization Science, 30(1), 1-18.
Staw, B. M., Sandelands, L. E., & Dutton, J. E. (1981). Threat rigidity effects in organizational behavior: A multilevel analysis. Administrative Science Quarterly, 26(4), 501-524.
Sutcliffe, K. M., & Vogus, T. J. (2003). Organizing for resilience. In K. S. Cameron, J. E. Dutton, & R. E. Quinn (Eds.), Positive organizational scholarship: Foundations of a new discipline: 94–110. San Francisco, CA: Berrett-Koehler.
Taylor, S. E. (2011). Social support: A review. In H. S. Friedman (Ed.), The Oxford handbook of health psychology (pp. 189-214). Oxford University Press.
Valero, A., & Van Reenen, J. (2019). The economic impact of universities: Evidence from across the globe. Economics of Education Review, 68, 53-67.
World Economic Forum. (2024, January 30). These are the top international universities: Why their cooperation has never mattered more. Retrieved from https://www.weforum.org