Researchers, government bodies, and organizations have been repeatedly calling for a shift in the responsible AI community from general principles to tangible and operationalizable practices in mitigating the potential sociotechnical harms of AI. Frameworks like the NIST AI RMF embody an emerging consensus on recommended practices in operationalizing sociotechnical harm mitigation. However, private sector organizations currently lag far behind this emerging consensus. Implementation is sporadic and selective at best. At worst, it is ineffective and can risk serving as a misleading veneer of trustworthy processes, providing an appearance of legitimacy to substantively harmful practices. In this paper, we provide a foundation for a framework for evaluating where organizations sit relative to the emerging consensus on sociotechnical harm mitigation best practices: a flexible maturity model based on the NIST AI RMF.

The accelerating convergence of geopolitical volatility, technological disruption, environmental stress, and societal transformation has rendered traditional strategic management frameworks insufficient. Organizations now operate in environments defined not only by disruptions with existential implications but by wickedness—conditions in which problems are ambiguous, stakeholders disagree, and solutions reshape the challenge itself. Building on the premise that strategy itself is a wicked problem, this article advances a central claim: organizational resilience is best understood as an architectural capability largely grounded in humanity-based identity. Unlike organizational structure, mission, or even current strategy, each of which may be transient in turbulent environments, organizational identity, which is a construct that derives from individuals and humanity, provides an enduring basis for harmonizing the organization and its environment. Utilizing the lens of “humanity”—in its two dimensions of humankind and humaneness—we synthesize research on wicked problems, organizational identity, dynamic capabilities, modular design, alliances and smart power, and hybrid intelligence. We then propose an integrative model linking humanity-driven identity to resilience through three vectors—Inspirational Transformative Ambition, Innovative Value Networks, and Hybrid Intelligence Ecosystems—operationalized via a recently developed diagnostic tool. Finally, we offer corroborative evidence for the “Business of Humanity” logic, arguing that aligning humankind (opportunity across the full market spectrum) with humaneness (values-based evaluation) strengthens resilience by expanding opportunity sets while enhancing legitimacy, trust, and stakeholder alignment.

In this study, we adopt the lens of routines, a core construct in the theory of organizations through which to view how enterprises respond to societal disruptions. Organizational routines refer to the established, repetitive patterns of activity performed by groups and individuals within an organization. Examples include standard operating procedures, patterns of communication and coordination, and distinctive decision protocols. Informed by the lens of routines, we investigate a significant adaptation triggered by the global COVID-19 pandemic, arguably one of the most consequential disruptions in the recent past: hybrid work. We propose that hybrid work—where employees alternate between remote and in-person work arrangements—represents a fundamental transformation in organizational work routines. Simultaneously, however, there is significant variation in its retention—some firms institutionalized hybrid work as a durable routine, while others reverted to pre-pandemic, on-site models. To investigate this variation, we adopted an empirically grounded quantitative discovery approach—specifically, an abductive design using archival data—to examine how organizational work routines change and persist in response to external events. We suggest that the persistence of new routines that emerge in response to societal disruptions is shaped by internal organizational characteristics, especially the information processing capacities that shape how firms interpret and respond to external events.