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This paper aimed to deepen the sense-making of organisational transformation in the banking sector through operationalisation of leadership strategy as the set of policy actions and strategic pursuits. The qualitative data were collected from cumulative 96 annual corporate disclosures of the 12 banks listed in the Nairobi Securities Exchange as of the year 2020 covering 2007 to 2020 and corresponding to specific systemic disruptive events. Data were analysed using thematic content analysis. Two research questions were answered. First, what leadership strategy set do bank executives deploy to achieve organisational transformation? Second, what mechanism explains how leadership strategy translate into organisational transformation? The study found that activation of leadership strategy as an input factor provided a mural for its advancement as a policy tool that can be evaluated in organisational transformation as a manifest output. The study identified a gap in the extant literature that organisational resilience paid limited attention to policy choices and actions deployed to orchestrate organisational transformation as a distinct feature.

The theory of dynamic resource orchestration explains the differentiated response of homogeneous ecosystem organizations to systemic disruptive shocks. The Covid-19 precautionary measures in Kenya have exempted some essential service providers and government agencies, resulting in a differentiated Covid-19 impact across the national SMEs landscape. This article adopted an extractive thematic analysis technique to draw insights from in-depth interviews and discussions with owners and managers of 6 broad-range SMEs considered non-essential services providers excluded from the Covid-19 cessation of movement waiver. The article advanced insights on SMEs' resilience through dynamic resource orchestration capability. It sought to establish whether the possession and orchestration of dynamic resources capabilities differentiated highly resilient SMEs from non-resilient ones. The article identified business diversification, slack finance, intra-stakeholder collaboration, self-reinvention, positive psychology, technology leverage, and cost management as precursory resilience agents within Kenyan SMEs. Research gaps were identified, and recommendations for future research were proposed.