September 2015 saw a sharp increase in the influx of refugees in the Øresund region. In this study, resilience defined as flexible adaptation was taken as a baseline to guide interviews with societal infrastructure actors and NGOs engaged in managing the situation. Different actors had different organisational preconditions that influenced their ability to adapt to the new situation. Among the strongest drivers behind resilient performance were the organisation’s ways of relating to established rules, regulations, procedures and processes, the way relationships were formed between people and hierarchical layers within the organisations, and the perceived value of the human operator and the human contribution within the organisational whole. These values, in turn, determined how the organisations shaped many of the basic conditions that allowed resilient performance to develop. In the study it was found, for public actors in particular, that the criteria necessary to adapt to the situation were not met by organisational structures and processes.