Building before the storm: A multi-level framework for resilience in professional public institutions under permacrisis

Organizations now operate in permacrisis, where disruptions compound and recur before recovery is complete, and playbooks built for discrete shocks no longer fit. This is acute for professional public institutions, whose authority rests on public legitimacy. Drawing on six years inside the Israeli judiciary (2018–2024), which absorbed a pandemic, a military mobilization and a constitutional confrontation, together with cross-sector benchmarking and court performance data, we propose a multi-level resilience framework. Our framework locates resilience across individual, team, and organizational levels, with perceived publicness as their normative foundation and Organization Development (OD) consulting as one means of developing and connecting resilience capacities prospectively. We state the framework's boundary conditions and offer a before, during and after playbook. For leaders, the lesson is direct: build the capacity before the storm.