Orchestrating recovery: Strategic agility amid an endogenous misstep

Purpose. This study extends prevailing conceptualizations of strategic agility by examining its role in managing internally generated organizational errors. It explains how strategic sensitivity, leadership unity and resource fluidity support detection, communication and damage control in the wake of an internally generated failure that escalated into a strategic misstep. Design/methodology/approach. This study adopts a historical case design (August 2016–September 2017), triangulating more than 150 secondary sources and combining descriptive coding with theory-guided template analysis to reconstruct Samsung's actions during the Galaxy Note 7 recall. Findings. A process model is proposed to explain how strategic agility functions as a coordination mechanism over time in response to an internal error. The meta-capabilities were distinctively activated across the recovery process, with their role appearing to depend on temporal and functional alignment. Practical implications. Managers should treat error recovery not as improvisation but as capability orchestration. Cultivating strategic agility in advance and rehearsing the alignment of its meta-capabilities under pressure can shape whether an error escalates into reputational loss or is more likely to be converted into a recovery trajectory and organizational learning. This capability orchestration also reduces the risk of error amplification, in which errors repeat, accumulate, or escalate through reinforcing feedback loops. Social implications. Recovery strategies influence how firms are judged as corporate citizens. Stakeholders weigh technical fixes alongside the speed, coherence and transparency of responses. Originality/value. The study contributes to strategic management and organizational resilience literature by conceptualizing strategic agility as a phase-sensitive capability applicable to endogenous disruptions.