Reconceptualizing Resilience and Renewal From the Perspectives of Reform and Reimagination

Current crisis communication research frequently contrasts the merits of resilience with renewal. Resilience focuses on crisis response strategies intended to fortify an organization or community’s capacity for withstanding crises. Renewal moves beyond resilience to include proactive strategies intended to thwart the recurrence of similar crises. In this essay, we propose extending this discussion to include reform and reimagination. Reform focuses on retrospectively making major changes to the status quo in response to a perceived pattern of failures. Reimagination promotes novel thinking to create collaborative strategies for proactively addressing compounding risks. Reform and reimagination are proposed as strategies for managing the increasingly complex nature of crises.