Crisis Leadership and Sensemaking

Events such as 9/11, Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear accident, Deepwater Horizon Oil disaster, Hurricane Katrina, Ebola outbreak in West Africa, 2003 US/Canada Blackout, global financial crisis of 2008 and the COVID-19 pandemic all contain the hallmarks of a crisis event. Weick and Sutcliffe (Managing the unexpected: resilient performance in an age of uncertainty. Wiley, San Francisco, 2007 [1]) argue that ‘unexpected events often audit our resilience. Everything that was left unprepared becomes a complex problem’. Leadership plays a pivotal role in managing such crisis (whether they emerge as a black swan event (Taleb in The black swan: the impact of the highly improbable. Penguin Books Ltd, London, 2007 [2]), the ‘elephant in the room’ or as a ‘creeping crisis’ (Boin et al. in Risk Hazards Crisis Public Policy 11(2), 2020c [3]). The Covid-19 pandemic for example has resulted in considerable impact on global health security, human security and the global economy. As described in (OECD in A systemic resilience approach to dealing with Covid-19 and future shocks New Approaches to Economic Challenges, 2020 [4]), ‘…the pandemic has reminded us bluntly of the fragility of some of our most basic human-made systems. Shortages of masks, tests, ventilators and other essential items have left frontline workers and the general population dangerously exposed to the disease itself. At a wider level, we have witnessed the cascading collapse of entire production, financial, and transportation systems, due to a vicious combination of supply and demand shocks’. This highlights the volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity (VUCA) conditions that shape the crisis landscape and its effect on inherent vulnerabilities that exist within our systems. By drawing upon recent disaster events and more recently the COVID-19 pandemic, this chapter examines sensemaking within the context of crisis leadership and presents a crisis leadership framework focused on absorptive, adaptive and generative capacities (Castillo and Trinh in J Organ Change Manage 32(3), 2019 [5]) to support problem framing, solution navigation and innovation.