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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
Sequencing
The same set of changes succeeds or fails depending on the order. Sequence determines who has to move before the evidence arrives, and that is the whole difficulty.
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02
Changing What You Should Have Left Alone
Some inefficiencies are load-bearing. A practice with no visible purpose has usually survived because it was solving something, and the cost of removing it appears months later in an unrelated place.
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03
The Announcement Fallacy
Communicating a change is not making one. The announcement is the cheapest part and it feels like the hardest, which is why leaders reliably mistake it for completion.
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04
Change Fatigue
The fifth initiative fails on arrival because of what happened to the first four. People are not tired of change; they have learned that waiting is the winning strategy.
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05
Resistance Is Usually Information
Most of what gets labelled resistance is an accurate objection from somebody closer to the work. The label is attractive because it converts a substantive problem into a personnel matter.
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06
The Month-Four Collapse
Every change programme has a point where the initial energy is spent and the results have not arrived. It is predictable, it is survivable, and almost nobody plans for it.
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07
What Organizations Actually Learn
Findings that require a permanent change in somebody's behaviour do not survive. Findings encoded into a form, a threshold, or a scheduled event survive without anybody remembering why.
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08
Rebuilding Trust
Trust returns through accumulated small instances of doing what you said, on a timeline you do not control. Announcements do not accelerate it and reliably set it back.
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09
Accountability Without Scapegoating
Locating a person ends the inquiry, which is precisely what makes it attractive. The test is whether a competent replacement in the same system would have produced the same outcome.
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10
The After-Action Review
Ninety minutes, held within three weeks, run by somebody who is not the senior person. Reconstruct the timeline before anybody explains anything, and produce three fixes rather than fourteen recommendations.
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