Factors underlying organizational resilience: The case of electric power restoration in New York City after 11 September 2001

The 2001 World Trade Center attack resulted in widespread and highly non-routine failures to critical infrastructure systems. An immediate priority following the attack was the restoration of electric power in lower Manhattan. A study of the organization responsible for conducting this restoration is here presented in order to provide a productive critique of factors theorized by Woods (2006) [1] to affect organizational resilience. Data sources include logs of the behavior of the electric power infrastructure and extensive interviews with personnel at various levels of the organization. The conclusions of the analysis are used to frame a refined set of factors that shape organizational resilience, and to provide observations on the processes that underlie how organizations achieve—or fail to achieve—the potential for resilience.