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Crisis and Change
Leading through disruption. What holds when conditions break, how confidence is kept, and how organizations are steadied and remade.
Chapter contents
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Aftermath 5 entries The narrow window for institutional learning: the after-action review, accountability without scapegoating, and rebuilding trust.
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Decline and Turnaround 5 entries Recognising decline before the financial indicators, the turnaround sequence, cutting well, and closure as an act of stewardship.
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Leading Change 6 entries Sequencing, the early win and its trap, who must be persuaded first, and encoding a change so it does not revert.
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Preparation 5 entries Prepare roles and decision rights rather than scenarios. Continuity for small organizations, and running a tabletop that produces information rather than reassurance.
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Response 7 entries The first six hours, information discipline, disclosure timing, and sustaining judgment when the facts are still moving.
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Understanding Crisis 2 entries Crisis, emergency, and problem are different situations requiring different instruments. The taxonomy, the five types, and the slow crisis nobody declares.
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Why Change Fails 5 entries The month-four collapse, resistance as information, change fatigue, and the difference between announcing a change and making one.
Entries filed directly to this chapter
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01
Knowing When to Close Something
Closing well is an act of stewardship, and it is available only while there are still resources to do it with. An organization that continues until it collapses has chosen the worst version by…
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02
The Honest Assessment
Telling a board that the organization may not be viable is the hardest thing a leader does, and delaying it removes the options that would have made the conversation survivable.
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03
Cutting Well
One round, deep enough, with the reasoning stated. The slow bleed feels humane and destroys the organization, because a second round teaches everybody capable of leaving that there will be a third.
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04
The Turnaround Sequence
Stabilise, diagnose, cut, rebuild. The order is not a preference. Each stage depends on something the previous one produces, and reversing any two is how recoverable situations become terminal.
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05
Recognising Decline
The financial indicators arrive last. Everything that would have told you earlier is qualitative, available for years beforehand, and reported to nobody.
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06
The Change Sequence Plan
One page: order, owners, checkpoints, and the conditions under which you stop. Written before the announcement, because the reversal criteria have to be set by somebody with no stake in the answer.
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07
Making It Stick
A change survives only once it is encoded into hiring, promotion, budget, and calendar. Until then it depends on the leader's continued attention, and that attention is a finite resource.
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08
Communicating Change Over Months
The launch reaches almost nobody. What carries a change is a cadence of small, unremarkable references sustained past the point where the leader has become bored of the subject.
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09
Who Must Be Persuaded First
A small number of people function as evidence for everybody else. Identifying them is a matter of who is watched rather than who holds a title, and the two overlap less than expected.
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10
The Early Win and Its Trap
An early result buys the credibility to attempt the difficult thing. It becomes a trap when the pursuit of demonstrable progress starts selecting which problems the organization works on.