As the pandemic marks a third anniversary, business leaders around the world are eager to move on. But few companies have systematically institutionalized what they’ve learned from their Covid-19 experience to build resilience.

We attempt to distill the lessons from two truly ambitious projects—NASA’s Apollo program and Pfizer’s Lightspeed project—and show how, to succeed, projects and organizations must resolve the tensions between ingenuity and control.

Breaking the inherent trade-off between search and execution will require new approaches. We describe one such approach, “co-ambidexterity,” which interweaves firms’ and customers’ search and execution processes.

Unlike humans, companies have no natural lifespans. Even so, they are subject to an unrelenting process of decline - accumulating excessive bureaucracy and becoming increasingly ineffective at adapting to their environments as they age.