Navigating Crisis

The first part of the Learn-and-Do Kit serves as a knowledge base. Here, we explore theoretical concepts of resilience and creativity to establish a common understanding of these terms before moving on to specific practices that illustrate their interaction.

In the midst of global crises and local challenges, calls for the higher education sector to become more resilient are getting louder. But what does this actually mean? Resilience has become a buzzword often used with no clear conceptual foundations. In this section, we unpack core understandings of resilience and show how they connect to creativity. Going beyond merely theoretical explanations, we look at specific practices within the sector that showcase the interplay of resilience and creativity.

What does resilience mean?

When we think of resilience in higher education, the most prominent examples coming to mind are probably the COVID-19 pandemic and the advent of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Though these events are quite different, both emphasise that resilience plays a role whenever events disrupt the known functioning of the sector. Other disruptions may include natural disasters, political conflicts or sudden changes in the regulatory environment but can also relate to technological disruptions like cyberattacks or major IT system failures. In all of these cases, institutions need to find ways to modify their core activities while at the same time continuing to support students in their learning processes and staff in their work.

But let’s take a look at what we mean when we talk about resilience. The first thing to know is that its understanding has changed over time. In earlier conceptualisations, resilience meant being able to bounce back to an earlier state after a crisis. So, the focus was very much on recovering a previous state and going back to a status quo. This, however, meant discarding the changes made once a crisis had passed.

In recent years, this understanding has shifted, with more research suggesting that resilience refers not only to the capacity to endure stress but also to the ability to adapt, evolve and innovate in response to crisis. Because it is not simply about surviving a crisis but to use it as an opportunity to reshape the institution longterm. This includes the preparation for crises by mobilising existing resources and identifying blank spots as well as defining ways of how to embed new learnings into the institutional culture. Thereby, recent contributions not only highlight the bouncing forward aspect of resilience but go beyond and actually focus on the processual developments across three phases of resilience:

Therefore, resilience is a process that spans from before the crisis, while it happens to after the crisis. It focuses on the capabilities universities actively build through strategic decisions and everyday practices.

The three phases of resilience are called anticipation, coping and adaptation:

• The anticipation phase relates to what happens before a crisis. It involves recognising potential threats as well as taking preparatory actions. Anticipation at higher education institutions relies heavily on understanding the resources of the organisation: What can we draw on?

• What happens during a crisis is referred to as the coping phase. It is connected to the concrete actions taken to manage an acute crisis. Coping mechanisms are immediately relevant for internal and external communication to flow and for sustaining academic and administrative functions, including teaching and faculty work: What needs to be done immediately to cope with the crisis?

• After the crisis, the higher education institution might not be the same, with long term changes possibly taking place in the adaptation phase. Reflecting on the experiences from the crisis can lead to new insights and changes within the institution, in subunits such as faculties, departments or study programmes as well as in individual teaching: What can we learn from this crisis to help us prepare for future ones?

How does creativity relate to resilience?

Creativity comes into play across all stages of the anticipation, coping and adaptation phases of dealing with a crisis.

These solutions, however, need to to work in a given context. This means that creativity is located between novelty (or originality) and appropriateness (or effectiveness), operating within cultural, political and institutional boundaries that define which solutions are possible and legitimate .

Another important consideration when looking at creativity is that it should not be understood as an individual trait, but rather as a social process shaped by the interplay between individual agency and organisational structures . What does that mean? Looking at higher education institutions, we are in a unique position to find an environment that is host to many creative individuals and spaces. From the classroom itself, the development of curricula, the setup of technical solutions to the improvement of strategic decision-making – creativity is already deeply embedded into established practices.

The challenge now is to intentionally and actively leverage the creative potential already present at their organisation within the three phases of resilience:

Creativity in Anticipation

Anticipation is about creating preparedness ahead of disruption. Even when there is no immediate pressure, anticipatory work determines how much room for manoeuvre will exist once disruption occurs. In the anticipation phase, creativity is crucial because it widens the set of possible responses through scenario-building and the imagination of alternative futures. In doing so, it strengthens proactive exploration.

Creativity in Coping

In the coping phase, disruption is no longer hypothetical. Higher education institutions must respond urgently under time pressure and resource constraints. Resilience in this phase depends on rapid coordination, clear information flows and the ability to stabilise work routines even as conditions keep shifting. Here, creativity relates to the improvisation to adapt tools, roles and practices in real time, often without the option to plan first and act later as well as to finding ad-hoc solutions and novel collaborations.

Creativity in Adaptation

In the adaptation phase, institutions move beyond immediate crisis response and begin to stabilise what has changed. This phase is about deciding what the "new normal" looks like: Which practices are worth keeping, which routines need redesign and which teaching practices and processes can be institutionalised so that learning does not remain dependent on a few individuals? Creativity contributes to translating improvisations into long-term practices, thereby cultivating institutional learning and embedding innovation in institutional culture.

To further explore how the creative potential can be realised within higher education institutions, it can be useful to draw on three components of creativity:

1. Domain-relevant skills: expertise about the field in which one wants to be creative is needed to develop novel and appropriate solutions.
2. Creativity-related processes: creativity requires cognitive skills to think outside the box.
3. Task motivation: People need an intrinsic interest to be able to create something new and effective.

Becoming resilient through creativity equally requires a consideration of the cultural, political and institutional boundaries of each individual higher education institution – these define which solutions are possible and legitimate. Additionally, a lack of clarity around organisational goals and an overemphasis on maintaining the status quo can hinder the willingness and ability to innovate, and therefore to be creative. Creativity enables institutions to embrace change while preserving their core identities as centres of research, teaching and societal engagement. To be fully realised, creativity needs to be an integral part of organisational resilience in higher education. When universities nurture creative responses, they are able to actively redefine their future trajectories instead of merely surviving crises. Therefore, if you want to understand resilience, it is essential to consider creativity for your individual context and identity.

For the interplay of resilience and creativity, our research revealed recurring themes such as resource availability, collaboration and communication as well as the distribution of responsibilities as leading dimensions for practices at higher education institutions. To illustrate these rather abstract concepts, we will showcase specific practices across the three resilience phases: anticipation, coping and adaptation. These practices stem from case study research conducted within our research projects. Additionally, we will look at the impact of context and identity on how higher education institutions navigate through the three phases of resilience.

The anticipation phase

In our case study data, we found three practices that clearly illustrate how resilience and creativity are interlinked in the anticipation phase.

Practice 1: Collaboration for interdisciplinary course design

For a Canadian public university, one key practice in the this phase is the steady collaboration between instructional designers, subject matter experts and teaching staff to develop an interdisciplinary course design:

A central element of this practice is establishing roles, points of contact and translation work between didactical, disciplinary and operational perspectives before a crisis. This reduces coordination efforts as people already know who to involve, how to work together and how to turn emerging problems into workable teaching solutions once routines are challenged. Interdisciplinary practices like that do not only bundle expertise but also enable the exploration of recombining established practices in novel ways. This creates a steady flow of small innovations that expand the institution’s space of action before disruption hits.

Practice 2: Creation and use of a global network

Another practice, observed at an open university in Portugal, concerns the creation and use of networks beyond the institution. Such networks can be related to subject-matter aspects, consist of multiple higher education institutions or integrate the internationality of students and staff:

The use of a global network is embedded into a model of distance learning, thereby routinely connecting students and staff across countries and cultural contexts. In doing so, the network creates access to diverse experiences and perspectives that can be mobilised during an acute crisis. This kind of collaboration and communication requires the continued use of educational technology to further stabilise these connections and normalise cross-border exchange.

Practice 3: Comparing and benchmarking

Closely related to the previous practice, comparing and benchmarking emerged as a third practice in the anticipation phase, showcased by a Kenyan public university. This involves comparing one’s own institution with others in terms of specific aspects:

Therefore, benchmarking serves as a source of inspiration, particularly in relation to decisions about educational technology. For the public university in Kenya, it is a deliberate strategy to make informed decisions about technology and its implementation under constrained conditions. Additionally, it provides orientation regarding available tools and organisational setups and helps staff identify what could be used or adjusted for their own context.

The coping phase

In our data, three practices illustrate how resilience and creativity become clearly intertwined when coping with an acute crisis.

Practice 1: Rapid skill-building through combining technical and didactic skills

For a German private university of applied sciences, a crucial practice in the coping phase is the rapid mobilisation of combined technical and didactic training formats to foster skill-building:

Under crisis conditions, these trainings are central spaces for exchange and improvisation. Participants share workarounds, adapt ideas across contexts and generate solutions that are "good enough" to maintain continuity in teaching, even when perfect planning is impossible. All of this is enabled through different forms of expertise coming together for fast and creative problem-solving. This approach reduces immediate vulnerability because the staff is able to troubleshoot digital teaching challenges, align tools with teaching goals and regain a sense of operational control when routines suddenly shift.

Practice 2: Student-led online spaces

Another practice for the coping phase visible in our data concerns student-led online spaces hosted on institutional platforms, as evidenced within an open university in Portugal:

During the crisis, these spaces provide continuity of engagement while allowing students to shape interaction on their own terms. Rather than relying only on top-down formats, the space enables bottom-up initiatives, where students create and organise new activities in response to the constraints of the moment.

Practice 3: Flexibility of roles and responsibilities

A third coping practice, identified in a private university of applied sciences in the United Kingdom, is a sharp rise in the flexibility of established roles and responsibilities.

Under acute pressure, there is a temporary shift in how work is organised. With people stepping in beyond their usual roles, helping across units and prioritising what is workable over what is ideal, this practice shows a collective "all-hands-on-deck" mentality. The shared sense of urgency in the coping phase reduces established status barriers and allows people to come together around ideas and solutions.

The adaptation phase

In our data, three practices illustrate how resilience and creativity become intertwined in the adaptation phase.

Practice 1: Redesigning assessment in response to AI

One adaptation practice prompted by the advent of generative AI and observed at a Canadian public university is the reassessment of long-established exam formats:

This practice addresses a structural vulnerability of higher education institutions. When exams or other assessment formats are no longer reliable for measuring learning outcomes, higher education institutions risk losing credibility and coherence. As generative AI makes its way into learning processes, it is necessary to revise assessment principles and to embed new routines that remain meaningful under changed conditions.

Practice 2: Rethinking face-to-face time in teaching

Another practice during the adaptation phases comes from a private university in Germany and addresses how face-to-face time in teaching changes once acute disruption has passed:

Following the acute crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic, teaching staff has moved content delivery to the online space in order to focus on interaction and discourse during face-to-face classes. This redesign of teaching formats requires a creative recombination of tools and pedagogical logics, moving parts of the learning process into asynchronous spaces and using in-person sessions more deliberately for discussion, critique and engagement.

Practice 3: Revising curricula development

One practice in the adaptation phase that emerged at a public university in Kenya is the development of curricula responsive to evolving (inter-)disciplinary and labour-market demands:

This practice reflects an organisational adjustment: universities use learnings from disruption and transformation to reposition study programmes and to ensure continued relevance and institutional viability. This requires bridging previously separate fields, experimenting with new programme architectures and translating emerging knowledge domains into coherent teaching structures.

The impact of identity and context

As the practices above illustrate, the resilience-creativity nexus is not a uniform capability that unfolds in the same way across all higher education institutions but is highly individualised. This is in part due to two enabling (and constraining) factors: organisational identity and external context. While organisational identity provides orientation and stability, it also sets boundaries for what kinds of creative solutions are perceived as fitting and legitimate. In turn, external context defines feasibility: what can be implemented, scaled and sustained especially when internal motivation and capability exist?

To fully understand the interplay between resilience and creativity, it is important to understand how these two factors impact the way higher education institutions navigate through the three phases of resilience.

Organisational identity

Drawing on our case study research, we see that organisational identity shapes resilience by defining what kinds of responses are seen as appropriate, especially when a university’s self-understanding is closely tied to particular modes of teaching. This identity anchors the institution’s "default" response patterns when disruption occurs. Take a look at the following quotes from two different cases of our research illustrating different kinds of organisational identity:

These two vastly different self-understandings – one of an open university in Portugal with a focus on distance education and one of a brick-and-mortar university in Germany with a focus on in-person teaching – greatly impact the institutional resilience responses. For an institution whose identity is anchored in face-to-face and campus-based teaching, resilience may be enacted as continuity and selective refusal rather than digital expansion, thereby also narrowing which forms of creativity are seen as appropriate. For an institution whose identity is rooted in distance learning and inclusion, by contrast, digital modes of teaching are not primarily experienced as an exception but as a familiar baseline.

In this sense, organisational identity shapes not only what counts as a "good" response in the crisis scenario, but also which creative options are perceived as fitting and therefore which resilience pathways become realistically available.

External context

In terms of context influence, external conditions such as infrastructure and access constraints, factors that lie beyond the university’s control, can directly limit resilience and, by extension, the kinds of creativity that can be mobilised in practice. Take a look at the following quotes from two different cases of our research illustrating these contextual factors:

These quotes illustrate how external context can shape what is feasible in building resilience through creativity. Where basic infrastructure and access conditions are fragile, as is the case at the institution in Kenya with limited bandwidth, institutions may be forced to prioritise maintaining core functions over experimenting with new solutions, which can narrow the range of creative options in the scenario. At the same time, context is not only material but also systemic. Regulatory and competitive environments influence the urgency and incentives for innovation. Where there is little external pressure or competition as is the case of the higher education institution in Austria, innovation may be deprioritised or slowed down, even if internal motivation exists. In this sense, external context defines the practical "room for manoeuvre" in which resilience and creativity can unfold, thereby opening certain pathways while closing others.

Start doing

From Learning to Doing

Building on the theoretical foundations and empirical practices, we have developed a Resilience & Creativity Canvas to enable you to reflect your institution’s practices of resilience and creativity as well as your role within these processes.

The canvas offers a visual chart that connects the three phases of resilience with five dimensions to reflect your practices of resilience and creativity across the three phases of resilience:

• Infrastructure & Resources refers to the technical setup for learning processes (including specific tools), specialised training opportunities for different target groups and purposes as well as the actual use of existing resources before, during and after a crisis.
• Collaboration & Communication concerns the processes and structures for interdisciplinary and multi-level collaboration, lines of communication as well as forms of cooperation within and beyond your higher education institution.
• Roles & Responsibilities relate to the combination and inclusion of multiple perspectives, the allocation of work packages and tasks as well as the distribution of responsibilities.
• Context refers to the impact of regional and national contextual factors on resilience and creativity practices.
• Identity concerns the impact of your higher education institution’s self-understanding on resilience and creativity practices.

Through reflective questions and thought-provoking ideas, the canvas and the accompanying materials encourage you to identify key bottlenecks, enabling structures and actionable changes for your specific role within your institution. In doing so, the canvas allows you to engage with resilience and creativity in two different ways: by individually reflecting your own role in your higher education institution becoming more resilient and creative and by collectively reflecting practices of resilience and creativity within your higher education institution. These two courses of action are not mutually exclusive but offer different avenues depending on time, access to colleagues and whether or not you can convene a group for a collective reflection workshop.

If you want to engage with the interplay of resilience and creativity within your higher education institution individually – either because you are looking for a quick starting point or because facilitating a collective moment of reflection is not feasible at the moment – this section is for you. If you need a short refresher of the knowledge base, take a look at the short introduction to the theory and practices for working with the Resilience & Creativity Canvas. Follow the step-by-step guide to get started.

Step 1: Select the right canvas

With different roles coming together within higher education institutions, perspectives on the interplay of resilience and creativity are likely to vary. To account for these differences, we provide four role-specific versions of the canvas. As this kit focuses on teaching-related practices, , the four roles are as follows:

1. Leadership: If your role is closely connected to formal decision making on teaching development at a higher education institution, download the Leadership Canvas.
2. Teaching: If your role involves delivering teaching in practice, download the Teaching Canvas.
3. Technical support: If your role entails providing and stabilising the technical infrastructure and support teaching depends on, download the Technical Support Canvas.
4. Didactical support: If your role includes the translation of teaching goals into workable formats, templates, training, and course design support, download the Didactical Support Canvas.

We know that roles in higher education often overlap. For example, deans or study programme coordinators may combine teaching with leadership responsibilities, and staff in IT or didactical support may hold strategic roles within their units. If multiple roles apply to you, please choose one perspective for this reflection and work with the corresponding canvas accordingly.

Step 2: Define a crisis scenario and get started

Once you have selected the right canvas for you, you need to decide on one specific crisis as your use case. It can be a previous, a current or a possible future crisis. For consistency across the canvas, all questions are phrased in the present tense. Depending on whether you reflect on a past, ongoing, or future scenario, you may naturally adjust the tense as you work through the canvas.

The more you specify the crisis scenario of your use case, the easier it will be to work through the canvas. Possible examples include learning management system outage during exam week, power black out during the semester or health pandemic requiring a sudden switch to digital teaching.

Step 3: Use the personas

You may come across questions you cannot answer right away or you might need some inspiration when you start working with the canvas. For these instances, we are making use of personas. These are research-informed, realistic role profiles that help you apply the reflective questions to your own position. We have developed four personas for the different stakeholder groups involved in shaping resilient and creative teaching: for leadership (those involved in strategic decision-making), teaching (those implementing teaching), Technical support (those contributing to technical enablement) and didactical support (those contributing to didactical enablement). For each of those four perspectives, we have worked through the canvas using the crisis scenarios of the advent of generative AI exemplified by the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022. Therefore, the questions are answered from the vantage point of the adaptation phase, looking back at the anticipation and coping phase. Take a look and get inspired:

As resilience and creativity require ongoing interaction between different people and their environment, it is crucial to consider the variety of perspectives that come into play within higher education institutions. Decisions made by higher education leadership influence strategic orientation as well as technical infrastructure, while the latter also has an impact on teaching practices. Teaching practices, in turn, contribute to a higher education institution’s strategic orientation, all the while challenging its technical infrastructures. All of these complex relations need to be considered when reflecting a higher education institution’s resilience and creativity.

To account for this diversity of perspectives, the Resilience & Creativity Canvas can also be used for collective reflection in a workshop within your higher education institution. In bringing together multiple stakeholder groups, you can reflect how infrastructure and resources are set up and allocated, how collaboration and communication shape practices and how differentroles and responsibilities contribute to resilience and creativity, all the while keeping in mind your institution’s unique context and identity.

Step 1: Identify relevant stakeholders

At the beginning of your collective reflection process, you need to decide who to involve. Based on our research, we recommend to include at least the following perspectives, as these represent distinct roles in shaping resilient and creative teaching: decision-making, implementation and technical as well as pedagogical enablement:

• Decision making: Include those whose roles are closely connected to formal decision-making related to teaching development (e.g., strategic direction, mandates, resource allocation). Depending on your institutional structures, this may include (vice-)presidents, (vice-)chancellors (e.g., for teaching, digitalisation, infrastructure, internationalisation), as well as leadership of central units that shape teaching-related decisions (e.g., heads of IT units or teaching development/e-learning centres).

• Implementing teaching: Include professors and lecturers who deliver teaching in practice. When selecting participants for the workshop, consider that some teaching staff hold additional roles (e.g., deans, study programme directors, members of academic self-governance), which can add valuable insight into both implementation and decision-making dynamics.

• Technical enablement: Include staff who provide and stabilise the technical infrastructure and support teaching depends on (e.g., learning management support, system administrators, service desk). If possible, include both hands-on staff and leadership of IT units to represent operational realities and strategic constraints (capacity, priorities, governance).

• Pedagogical enablement: Include staff who translate teaching goals into workable formats, templates, training, and course design support (e.g., instructional designers, people working in teaching and learning centres). Including both unit leadership (strategic perspective) and staff working directly with teaching staff (operational perspective) helps capture what is feasible and what is needed.

Roles in higher education often overlap. Naturally, participants may bring in insights from their different roles during the discussion. For completing the canvas, however, we recommend that everyone chooses one main perspective for the reflection process, so the outputs remain clear and comparable across stakeholder groups. Additionally, make sure to involve at least three people of each stakeholder group.

Step 2: Conduct the collective reflection workshop

Starting this collective reflection process to better understand how your higher education institution navigates through the three phases of resilience (anticipation, coping, adaptation) is not something you can complete in one workshop. However, it can serve as a starting point and inspire further conversations to start rethinking existing structures and processes.

To facilitate this collective reflection process at your higher education institution, feel free to download the following open educational resources (CC-BY 4.0):

• Concept: the workshop playbook provides a detailed guideline of how to conduct the workshop within your institution to best facilitate the collective reflection process.

• Materials: the additional materials include four role-specific versions of the canvas to account for the different perspectives mentioned above. According to those perspectives, we have developed four personas to provide orientation and inspiration as well as workshop cards to support the discussion. Download and print out all materials here.

Step 3: Establish a continuous reflection process

Following the workshop, you will not only have revealed different perspectives on how your institution navigates through the three phases of resilience but also defined actionable next steps. To make sure that this conversation does not vanish, never to be seen again, think about how you can continue this reflection process to strengthen your institution’s resilience through creativity long-term:

• What existing structures can be used to continue this reflection process?

• Who do you need to ensure the actionable next steps can be implemented?

• What are the milestones you want to achieve and by when?

• Who is responsible for evaluating the workshop results and for organising further meetings to continue reflection?