Resilience and specialization in volatile environments:evidence from the Italian Air Force Tornado crews learning practices

The link between specialization and resilience in the organizational design literature is oftentimes characterized as a trade-off: either organizations attune their structures to a narrow class of external stimuli, or they choose the ability to manage a wide variety of inputs, thus increasing their ability to survive. Mixed behaviours are typically described in terms of compromise and lack of coherence. In this paper, we study the reliable and robust actions implemented in a volatile environment: we analysed the flying abilities and learning paths of pilots in the Italian Air Force. We show that in order to provide reliability and robustness, both high specialization and broad scope systems are required; expertise and learning are built across these areas which are traditionally described as segregated. In fact, the usefulness of such systems rests on their capability to buy time for processing and for finding appropriate or new solutions in volatile situation.