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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
Continuity Basics for Small Organizations
The realistic threat to an organization of thirty is not a disaster. It is one person being unavailable for three weeks, and that is entirely foreseeable and cheap to address.
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02
Crisis Roles and Decision Rights
Four roles, assigned by name while everyone is calm. The most common failure is the senior person absorbing all four and becoming the constraint on their own response.
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03
What Can Be Prepared and What Cannot
Scenarios are the wrong unit. Prepare the roles, the decision rights, and the first hour, because those are identical across crises and are what actually fails when one arrives.
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04
Early Recognition
The signals are almost always present and almost always explained away. The obstacle is not detection but a system in which raising something costs the person who raises it.
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05
Crisis, Emergency, Problem
The label determines the response, and the label is usually assigned by how alarming a situation feels rather than by what it threatens. Five types, each with a different clock.
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06
What a Crisis Actually Is
A crisis threatens the organization's ability to continue functioning. An emergency is urgent. A problem is difficult. Most organizations mislabel all three and reach for the wrong instrument.
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