While organizations increasingly face crises, the strategy literature has overlooked how organizations adapt to them. To bridge this gap, this article builds on punctuated equilibrium theory and on the strategy perspectives that deal with crisis to construct the microfoundations of punctuated equilibrium theory. It develops a model highlighting crisis antecedents, adaptation to the crisis and crisis outcomes. In so doing, this article contributes to punctuated equilibrium theory and to the strategy literature on crisis by offering a renewed definition of crisis: the process of adaptation through which an organization changes (or does not change) its path following a signal of drift.
