The purpose of this work is to share methods used and lessons learned during a comprehensive inter-institutional pandemic disaster response in Heidelberg, Germany, conveying experiences of the regional SARS-CoV-2 vaccination rollout campaign for up to 1,000,000 vaccines in the year 2020. In this volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) environment, the following five strategic elements were pertinent for institutional arrangements so that specific contributions of the various project partners would be available fast without the necessity of extensive negotiations or information exchange: (1) robust mandate, (2) use of established networks, (3) fast onboarding and securing of commitment of project partners, (4) informed planning of supply capacity, and (5) securing the availability of critical items. Planning tools included analyses through a VUCA lens, analyses of stakeholders and their management, possible failures, and management of main risks including mitigation strategies. The method of the present analysis (VUCA factors combined with analyses of possible failures, and management of stakeholders and risks) can theoretically be adjusted to any public health care emergency anywhere across the globe. Lessons learned include ten tactical leadership priorities and ten major pitfalls.

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The embeddedness of communities of practice (CoPs)—self-organized groups of practitioners, who engage in the same practices, learn from each other, and innovate together—in contexts of formal hierarchical systems, is characterized through tension. CoPs drive learning and change, while formal systems are focused on stable execution and control, suppressing informality and self-organization. How leadership navigates this tension and shapes embeddedness is of interest to scholars and practitioners alike. In this article, we employ an interpretative research approach to explore how a CoP emerges and interacts with the formal hierarchy of the German Armed Forces. The findings of this study indicate that the embeddedness of a CoP within the formal organizational context molds through the dynamic interplay between administrative leaders and community members. In drawing from complexity leadership theory our grounded, cross-level, process model uncovers how a CoP evolves as individuals experience adaptive pressures in their practices stemming from environmental changes and start to generate new resources in response. Furthermore, it reveals how organizational leaders alternate between administrative leadership and enabling leadership techniques, allowing for both self-organized activities and also the integration of the emergent outcomes. Therefore, the model contributes to our understanding of the processes that unfold at the interface between a CoP and formal hierarchical system.

Publishers, today, are struggling with their business model: Their efforts to convert traditional content into digital products seem to be insufficient as recipients expect more than simply the mere digitalization of content. Dissatisfied with solely being informed by selected journalists, modern recipients are often interested in acquiring information from various sources, in discussing with others, or even in contributing with their own content. Hence, recipients seem to evolve from being simply readers to contributors themselves. With regard to the established term ‘user‐generated content’, we refer to those co‐creating recipients as users. To underline these assumptions, the present study explores (1) users’ expectations of sources of content and (2) their willingness to provide their own content. Our findings show that both user‐generated content and professional journalists’ content is of value to users. Second, we show that users are mainly driven to contribute by their own expertise, welfare of others, and personal acceptance in the community. With this study, we consider mainly the changed user behaviour in order to derive implications of user involvement for future business models of publishers, in particular on the customer value proposition as well as key resources and key processes.