by Michaela J. Kerrissey and Amy C. Edmondson for the Harvard Business Review
In May, the World Health Organization announced the end of the Covid-19 global emergency. Finally. But for many leaders, the announcement lifted little of the burden they carry. While the emergency is over, the crisis is not. We have shifted from the sudden crisis of the pandemic’s arrival to what we call a sustained crisis — a period of ongoing intense difficulty and uncertainty.
The trouble with a sustained crisis is that, unlike a sudden crisis, it arrives with ambiguous signals and no clear start date. As a result, leaders, including those who are great at handling sudden crises, can miss what’s called for in the current moment. Worse, some of the leadership behaviors that work in a sudden crisis can amplify burnout and constrain adaptation in a sustained crisis. We have identified key differences between sudden and sustained crises to help leaders understand what lies ahead and how to reorient their organizations so they can succeed in this new environment.
The Current Challenge for Leaders
Leaders today confront many intertwined problems that Covid unleashed or exposed: burned-out and frustrated workforces, for a start. Managers navigating hybrid meetings and introducing work-from-home policies that inevitably fail to satisfy everyone are longing for clarity. Education leaders grapple with school shootings and a sharp rise in mental health issues among kids. City leaders face empty downtowns. The list goes on. In many ways, the current moment is no easier than the unexpected events that hit us three years ago.
But it is different. Consider Ronni Cohn, CEO of SickKids, a top-ranked specialized pediatric hospital. When Cohn started as CEO in 2019, he set an inspiring vision for precision child health. His hospital would leverage the integration of data from all domains of a child’s determinants of health (genes, biology, environment) to dramatically advance pediatric care. This was personally meaningful to Cohn, a pediatrician and renowned geneticist. Then Covid hit. The plan understandably could no longer be the first priority. Three years later, just as he was starting to get back to his vision, a heightened flu season compounded with Covid, severely strained his organization once again. What was the role of the vision now? What did his exhausted staff need?
He is not alone. In a sustained crisis, problems are more ambiguous and tradeoffs less clear. The galvanizing moment is gone. Reserves have been depleted. This is why leadership is so needed today: to confront and navigate the new challenges of a sustained crisis.
Recognizing and Articulating What Is Different Today — and Why It Matters
Leaders must help their teams make sense of the contrast between a sudden and a sustained crisis to cultivate the right mindset for succeeding in this new terrain. Consider the emergency a sudden crisis creates — the unexpected, often dangerous situation requiring immediate action — like rising Covid deaths in March 2020 or the Chilean mine collapse in 2010. A sudden crisis presents a clear imperative to limit harm. The stakes are obvious and the timeframe limited. Risk tolerance is appropriately high because the risk of doing nothing is so obviously worse.
A sustained crisis is different. In an ongoing period of intense difficulty, trouble, or uncertainty, the primary goal is building resilience rather than preventing immediate harm. The stakes are subtle, the timeframe longer. Risk tolerance edges down as people try to return to deliberative decision-making while resources draw thin.
Human reactions also differ: Sudden crises spark fear and preoccupation with threat. People wonder: Are we going to be okay? In sustained crises, persistent challenges leave people wondering instead: Why bother? Realizing how deeply their world has changed, people long for the past and may feel disconnected and adrift.
From Fast Reactivity to Intentional Proactivity
What works for a sudden crisis won’t work for a sustained crisis. In the latter, instead of fast reactivity, leaders must practice intentional proactivity.
Because speed is essential in an emergency, centralized decision-making for issues that affect everyone is required. Consider the speed at which CEOs made decisions about stay-at-home work in March 2020. The president of Harvard University, where we work, ordered everyone whose presence was not physically required (for say, patient care) to go home on March 13th. Whether or not to teach virtually was not left up to individual faculty or teams. The centralization and speed of that decision — highly uncharacteristic of the university environment in which distributed autonomy and participative decisions are the norm — was accepted by all due to the crisis. Decisiveness and speed of execution were paramount. Then, of course, it was up to individuals and teams to figure out exactly how to make it all work.
Sticking with this approach today is alluring. Making decisions and commanding bold action to fix a problem feels good. But if carried forward by habit into a sustained crisis, this approach can exhaust and frustrate people, while cultivating a habit of prioritizing the urgent over the important. And, continued long enough, these approaches defeat the very purpose that drew many leaders into their roles in the first place: a compelling vision for the future.
In a sustained crisis, in contrast, what’s needed is wide-scale experimentation and local decision-making to engage people in a broad range of priorities, to find new solutions in a decentralized way that energizes. There is a greater emphasis on pausing to learn, explore, and experiment rather than simply act and act fast. This is not to say that a sudden crisis doesn’t call for experimentation. During the pandemic, many organizations survived through unprecedented levels of local experimentation and learning. But directives for focus were set from the top and often non-negotiable. When a hospital canceled elective surgery, for instance, staff refocused and experimented to figure out how to set up extra pulmonary intensive care capacity. Experimentation and (sometimes painful) learning followed.
Many leaders appear to be naturals in a sudden crisis. Taking control feels right. To know when and how to shift away from this approach is more difficult. It requires judgment and deliberateness. For example, in a recent conversation that one of us (Michaela) had with Ronni Cohn, he reflected, “Early in the pandemic, I knew I had to be the captain of the ship. Now, as the crisis has evolved and is currently evolving, I have multiple roles.” He spotted the shift and shifted with it — finding ways to bring the big vision back while addressing immediate needs. He listened attentively at the front lines of the organization and reestablished a culture of proactivity.
Leading in a Turbulent World
We identify three crucial leadership actions that can help engage everyone in the sustained learning that is needed to thrive in a turbulent world.
First, call attention to the shift.
Because sustained crises are drawn out and ambiguous, it is easy for everyone (not just leaders!) to miss the change. Explicitly state that it’s time for a shift to override the automatic sense-making of your employees. Such sense-giving is a central leadership task. Invite your people managers to stop saying, “Here is the plan” and to start saying, “Here are ways we might experiment to learn what works in this new environment.”
Second, stop rewarding firefighting.
In a sudden crisis, the urgent takes precedence. But urgency can become habitual, leaving many teams breathlessly rushing through agenda items in a way that inhibits questions and consideration long after the emergency has faded. Leaders play a vital role in breaking these habits.
Third, widen the aperture.
Build structures and processes for experimentation and improvement that invite a wider array of voices. Some organizations like Haier have taken dramatic steps to flatten their organizations to retain quick execution while rejecting top-down command. Others pursue process shifts (without major structural change) to establish broader engagement such as by setting up diverse teams to improve or redesign work processes.
As turbulence extends into the future, reengaging diverse voices through consultative processes is vital. After years of emergency response during which directive approaches took priority by necessity, leadership teams today must deliberately shake up their routines and introduce (or re-introduce) decentralized and collaborative decision-making.
The New Reality
Today we live in a volatile and uncertain world. Covid is not the only or last crisis of our lives. From climate change to swathes of bank closures, we need not look far. As former U.S. Treasury Secretary and Harvard professor Lawrence Summers recently noted, “This is the most complex, disparate, and cross-cutting set of challenges that I can remember in the 40 years that I have been paying attention to such things.”
In this new reality, the ability to recognize and shift between a sudden and a sustained crisis is a core leadership competency. Great leaders will be adept at picking the right frame at the right time and using it to help their organizations thrive.
