Ambidextrous Meta-Organizing for Tackling Grand Challenges: Insights from Cairo’s Housing Crisis

Making grand challenges seemingly intractable problems are difficulties to pursue goals that are jointly desirable, but which paradoxically have incompatible requirements. To further our understanding of the intricacies of overcoming this duality, this study examines foreign aid projects set up to tackle the housing crisis in Cairo, one of the world’s fastest-growing megacities. To be effective, aid needs to quickly fill pressing gaps in basic infrastructure whilst helping to build robust institutions. But there is a duality in that it is hard to pursue both goals simultaneously because of the time it takes to get the power holders to agree to policy reforms. By deploying an organizational ambidexterity lens, I uncover a process by which three mechanisms are deployed concomitantly to go around the tensions caused by contradictory goals: ‘temporal’ ambidexterity, where one goal is tackled at a time; ‘structural’ ambidexterity, where the focus is on one goal at the expense of the other; and ‘contextual’ ambidexterity, where there is an effort to realize synergies between the tasks of the other two mechanisms to tackle both goals simultaneously. After discussing the boundary conditions for the realisation of meta-organizational ambidexterity, I conclude with a discussion on implications to management scholarship on spurring action after mobilizing broad support for a common goal.