Crisis-Ready Leadership — what are the ingredients?

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Ethics Central

16 min readJun 8, 2020

How can you and your organisation be ready to respond and adapt well to a crisis? How can an individual or an organisation develop now the characteristics that will maximise their chances of responding well to significant challenge, shocks, crisis or change?

Asking this question now might seem like shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted.

In fact, it is still an urgent question. Most individuals and organisations are still working out how to respond to the Covid-19 crisis. It is not too late to develop the kind of agility needed even for this crisis. But this will not be the last incident demanding major change and dexterity from organisations and their leaders. Climate-change, wealth- and income- disparities, and surging nationalism make the likelihood of dramatic changes to our operating environment something that cannot be ignored in the planning horizon of organisations and leaders.

In this article, I want to suggest an important link between (i) achieving the kind of adaptability or crisis-readiness that enables you to adjust and adapt well to sudden and massive change, and (ii) a rather esoteric debate that raged some years back in moral and descriptive psychology about the possibility of “narrow” and “broad-based” dispositions such as character traits.

The key point is that adapting well, including ethically, to large-scale (as contrasted with incremental) change requires what have been called “broad-based” dispositions to make the right responses. Once we see this, it is clear that many things widely promoted as central to organisational and individual adaptability yield only “narrow” dispositions to get things right. Conversely, certain kinds of individual character and collective culture assume central importance.

What is a massive change? And what kind of adaptability does it require?

The kind of massive changes in view here are those that dramatically change the context in which you act, as an individual or an organisation. The range of possible actions and goals open to you has been radically revised, and you are required to rethink not just how you should achieve your goals, but what goals it makes sense to have in the first place. How you interact with others, how you think about and respond to risks (indeed which risks are worth thinking about), how quickly or slowly you take decisions, and how extensively you use collaboration or delegation … some or all of these may need to have a very different pattern from before. Navigating these questions both ethically and effectively is a tall order, because past experience of what worked well and met with approval may not be a reliable guide in your new and changed circumstances.

What organisations and leaders need is a capacity to succeed that is transferable from the “normal” circumstances of the past to the radically changed circumstances ushered in by the crisis. They need — in the jargon — “broad-based” dispositions to respond and react the right way.

What are “narrow” and “broad-based” dispositions?

Firstly, a “disposition” is the attribute of being likely to act or react in some ways rather than in others. So, dispositions include not just human skills and traits, but also more basic properties of ordinary objects. Simple dispositions include being heavy (a tendency to move towards the ground when there is nothing preventing it) or being fragile (a tendency to break under certain conditions). More complex dispositions are intelligence (a tendency to understand) or honesty (a tendency to avoid cheating and deception). Whatever personality and character traits there are — perhaps extroversion and introversion, aggression, through to courage, cowardice, generosity, wisdom and shrewdness — they are all dispositions to react, think, and behave in certain ways under certain conditions.

Next: among those dispositions that are (or can be) traits of humans, psychologists and moral philosophers distinguish between “narrow” and “broad-based” traits (e.g. Doris 1998; Harman 1999; Athanassoulis 2000; Kamtekar 2004). Narrow traits are those tendencies whose operation is confined to particular types of circumstances. Broad-based traits are those tendencies that apply to a broad range of different kinds of circumstances. For example, someone might be “good at strategic decisions when playing chess”, i.e. they are good at taking into account all current circumstances and future possibilities in order to optimise their chances of achieving appropriate goals, when these occur within games of chess. This would be a narrow trait — a strategic ability confined to the context of playing chess. It might be contrasted with a broad-based trait of being “good at strategic decisions” (full stop). Someone who had this latter attribute would be a person able to take account of current circumstances and future possibilities so as to optimise the achievement of appropriate goals, in any context at all. This person too would be good at strategy in a chess game; but transplant them into the contexts of investment strategy, or planning a passenger transport network, or an international relations crisis, they would perform equally well in all of these contexts, because their strategic abilities were “broad-based”, i.e. the tendency to succeed at strategy was not limited to one or two domains, but carried over into a broad range of very different areas. The same could not be said of the person with the “narrow” trait of being (merely) good-at-strategy-in-chess.

Are “broad-based” dispositions possessed by (or attainable by) humans?

The debate among psychologists, and particularly among moral philosophers, that raged in the 1990s and early 2000s, concerned whether humans were capable of broad-based character traits at all. Some scholars (e.g. Doris, and Harman, affiliating themselves with “situationism” in psychology) argued that there were no broad-based character traits actually obtaining among humans, or attainable by humans, and thus there are no virtues or vices (so Virtue Ethics — increasingly fashionable at that time, and still in vogue among many today — had better be abandoned). They defended this view by appeal to a range of psychological experiments, some of which are now quite famous — Stanley Milgram’s 1963 “Obedience to Authority” experiments, Darley and Batson’s 1973 “Good Samaritan” experiments, Isen and Levin’s 1972 “Finding a Dime” experiments, and Zimbardo’s 1971 “Stanford Prison Experiment”. These experiments purported to show that, in any new and unfamiliar scenario, it was the perceived features of the situation that seemed to determine how most people behaved, much more than any supposed “character traits” they had previously been held to possess. As the debate developed, it was conceded that there were, after all, traits like gentleness or generosity or certain kinds of courage; but such traits would only predict a person’s behaviour within a familiar range of contexts. In other words, these were still fairly “narrow” character traits. Taken out of those contexts, most people behaved more-or-less like one another.

We must skip past most of the (very interesting) details of the debate. Most now recognise that the empirical evidence does not, after all, rule out the possibility of genuinely broad-based character traits such as the virtues outlined by (e.g.) the Platonic and Aristotelian traditions. But it does highlight how sophisticated and demanding those accounts of the virtues are, and how rare those virtues are among actually-existing human populations.

One upshot of this debate is that many of the traits we assume to be broad-based are actually narrow traits. We think that people’s honesty, wisdom, ‘competences’, and ‘transferable skills’ are … well … transferable! But the social psychology evidence suggests that most people’s honesty and competence function within quite narrow ranges of related contexts. When people speak of ‘transferable skills’ they usually mean skills that can be transferred from one structured organisation or group context to another, or more narrowly from one business to another. We need only look at football managers to know that their success at one club is no guarantee of success at the next, despite the fact that apparently all of the key skills involved are the same (managing people, expertise in skills, training and tactics, etc.). Even if radical situationists were wrong to suppose that all our attributions of traits to people were fundamentally misguided; still they may well be right that we tend to assume people’s dispositions are more broad-based than they actually are.

It is very plausible that lots of dispositions are narrow. Why? Because our behaviour and abilities are often supported by social and institutional structures that we take for granted. Someone’s ability to take good decisions in Engineering might depend not just on gathering and evaluating relevant data, but also on quickly narrowing down the viable options in ways that depend on (e.g.) knowing what is treated as plausible by others within the sector. Similarly, although we treat “honesty” as a single thing, it looks as though people’s motivations to behave honestly may vary radically from one sphere to another because of differences in social cues. For example, someone might have a strong aversion to any kind of deception in the business sphere, because of a sense that your reputation is everything, or that business itself depends on rejecting deceptive practices. That same person might, within their marriage, be deceiving their spouse. Or it might be the other way around — some who would never deceive their nearest and dearest might behave entirely differently in the work sphere (“business is business”, perhaps!). Of course, we all know people who are prone to deception, or averse to it, in both public and private spheres alike. But there are many others with different tendencies in different spheres: theirs are “narrow” dispositions.

The empirical findings perhaps suggest that genuinely “broad-based” dispositions to get things right are pretty rare, and represent a significant achievement — both as regards getting things right ethically is concerned, and also as far as concerns strategically wise decision-making or arriving at a correct analysis or understanding from complex data.

The table below illustrates how skills and character strengths we tend to think of as “transferable” might actually turn out to be moderately narrow, and transferable only when the social scaffolding that supports them remains in place.

Table of Broad, Moderately-Narrow (incl. what we normally call “transferable skills"), and Very-Narrow dispositions.

The radical change brought about by a crisis can sweep away the social-scaffolding that sustains the skills and character traits in the middle column that we had thought were “transferable”. Agility in a crisis would then require the genuinely broad-based skills and traits in the left-hand column. But those are rare and hard-won.

This fits with what the ancients said about the “excellences” or “virtues” in humans (cf. Kamtekar 2004). They are rare achievements. Aristotle, for example, suggested that genuine human excellence required the ability to understand in a comprehensive way (comprehensive in scope, not necessarily in detail) what it took for human lives to be lived well, and also to understand the implications of that understanding for how one must think, feel and act now. The Greek term for living-well is “eudaimonia” — usually translated as happiness, but it really means having a life that is well-lived, that you could be justly proud of; and Aristotle’s term for the understanding of how to get to eudaimonia was “phronesis” — usually translated as practical wisdom. That practical wisdom will be partly — and perhaps only partly — something that a person could articulate to someone else (“in order to live well, I need to think, feel, and act in this, that and the other kinds of ways”). But it will also require thinking about and responding dynamically to new and unfamiliar situations, both minor variants of familiar situations, and radically new circumstances, in order to work out what is required of me now, in order for my life to be well-lived. And those who can do that successfully may not always be able to articulate (fully) why they are making the responses they are making.

Broad-based Dispositions and Crisis-Ready Leadership

We saw earlier that being “crisis-ready” means having broad-based dispositions to get things right. We need organisations and individuals able to make the right responses even when the props are kicked away that normally support our capacity to get things right.

My concern here is that many of today’s recommendations for individual and organisational adaptability confer only a “narrow” disposition to get things right. They may not lack all value or effectiveness, because even in a crisis, perhaps not all props are kicked away. But they will be risky to rely upon. Here, the attainment of what the ancients would have called “virtuous” or “excellent” individual character or collective culture comes into its own, because these are genuinely broad-based dispositions to getting things right and responding correctly, even in radically changed circumstances.

Many institutional frameworks and processes designed to deal with “risks” and uncertainty can prove extremely maladaptive in a crisis. Aside from the fact that they may fail to foresee the central elements of a crisis (how many organisational “Risk Registers” included pandemic and total lockdown?!!), often the risk-mitigation processes prioritise the checking of decisions by multiple people and through multiple layers of scrutiny. Risk management processes are often designed on the assumption that risks come from moving too quickly and with insufficient thought; but of course a crisis may well render that assumption false, attaching the most acute risks to inertia and slowness of response, rendering long deliberation processes deadly.

The same worry applies to the idea that codes of conduct, decision-making processes, division of powers, voting procedures, lists of “values”, and the like, will make an organisation or individuals agile and ambidextrous in the right way. These are things that help an organisation to respond well, under the range of conditions envisaged when they were set up. In other words, they provide a “narrow” disposition to get things right. It is in the nature of a crisis that it calls into question whether these things are still fit for purpose now.

What about the kinds of mantras that get widely shared in a crisis situation like the current Covid-19 pandemic? “Concentrate on your core activities”, or “Prioritise this (or that), e.g. communication”, or “Focus on the welfare and changed capacity of your staff”, or “Take account of the elevated importance now of x (or y)” are the kinds of things taken as wisdom in times of radical change and stress such as now. Do such things as these convey a broad-based disposition to get things right in radically changed circumstances? It is hard to see how they could. For one thing, they are very vague and limited in scope. It is hard to see how a few mantras like this could provide a school or a university with what it needs to respond well, adapting and changing where that is needed, and remaining constant in other areas where that is reassuring and helpful. And in other contexts, in banking perhaps, the implication of such mantras might seem to be that you should carry on more-or-less as before, just with (say) a bit of extra emphasis on staff welfare.

It might seem that the wise approach to a crisis is to go back to your overall “purpose” or “goals”. Does this give you a broad-based disposition to respond well to a crisis? It might, or it might not, depending on how well that personal or organisational “purpose” survives the changes brought by the crisis. For example, it might be that an organisation such as an airline or an overseas holidays company, or even a supermarket business, or cleaning company, might need to rethink their “purpose” in the light of the crisis. Very radical change may be needed. In such cases, merely going back to your organisation’s current stated “purpose” and prioritising your response around what will best promote that purpose, could be a badly misguided strategy if that purpose has been rendered flawed or obsolete.

On the other hand, reflecting on one’s purpose in a different way might be just what is needed to yield a broad-based disposition to get things right. The ancients insisted that genuine “excellence” or “virtue” consisted in an understanding of what was worth pursuing in human life in general (i.e. what made lives well-lived, what constituted eudaimonia) and what one could do right now, in these particular circumstances, to contribute to this. The ability to respond to circumstances, including a crisis, by reference to that kind of purpose — e.g. asking: “How can this organisation, or my own activities, best contribute to what is worthwhile in human life?” and basing one’s actions and responses on good answers to that question — is precisely to have a broad-based disposition to respond well to a crisis, to changed circumstances, or indeed to any circumstances.

Virtue and Good Culture

These last suggestions — going back to issues of our overall purpose, as humans and as human organisations, within the world and within our societies — seem to bring us closer to what is needed for a broad-based disposition to get things right when circumstances have radically changed.

Virtue, or all-round excellence of character as a human, is the disposition to find the right way to act well so as to make your best contribution to the flourishing , the living-well, of human (and other) life. It is hard-won, because it requires a 360-degree appreciation of what that flourishing consists in. And — as the social scientists seem to have shown us — that kind of integrated understanding is rarer and harder to achieve than we have tended to think (cf. again: Kamtekar, 2004). When that understanding of living-well, and an ability to work out how to contribute to it, are integrated deeply into a person’s instinctive as well as considered responses, then that person will be disposed to respond and act appropriately and effectively across all circumstances. Of course, this is to describe an ideal. But it is an ideal that it is possible for real people to get closer to — and the closer they get, the more crisis-ready they will be.

Ethical culture is the group equivalent of all-round excellence in the individual. It too will require the group or organisation to understand and appreciate what is involved in “living well” and how to contribute to this. An ethical organisational culture will have a keen appreciation of, and sustained interest in, the way their work contributed to human flourishing and responsible global citizenship. But it would also need to be the kind of culture that was capable of translating that into practical, viable action that made sense on the ground. A culture of this kind would give an organisation and its individuals it the “broad-based” disposition to react and behave well, when the context has been up-ended. Again, this describes an ideal, but it is one that real organisations can approximate to, and gain the advantages of agility in a crisis the more closely they do so.

It is interesting to reflect on how these conclusions relate to recent findings on the value of diversity to organisations. The clearest evidence tends to suggest that diverse teams show the greatest advantage, compared to homogeneous teams, the more creativity, new perspectives, and complex problem-solving are required (cf. Rock et al. 2016, Reynolds & Lewis 2017, CMI 2019). This offers some support to our suggestion that such situations (a crisis would be an extreme example) require a level of adaptability that is beyond most individuals. It also suggests that having a team of people that is diverse (by age, gender, ethnicity, but especially cognitively) is one way of achieving collectively-held broader-based dispositions to respond well to new challenges. Although collectively-held abilities may be less agile than those held by individuals (or exhibited widely through an organisation), they may have other strengths such as greater creativity. This possibility complements the value of “virtue” and good culture proposed here: while changing culture, character and skill might be long-term priorities, most organisations can quite quickly take steps towards improving their diversity.

The questions about how to develop individual excellence (of decision-making, of emotional response, of reasoning, and of motivation), and good collective culture, are a large and separate question. That it is possible is clear from the resources for individual and collective development available from many traditions within psychology, social science, therapeutic science, religious and philosophical thought, sporting expertise, and from the ‘common sense’ preserved within multiple cultures regarding (e.g.) raising children to adulthood. There are some good leadership-development resources that focus on adaptability of character. The Aristotelian recommendations emphasise careful reflection on human flourishing and what makes human lives “well-lived”, and then learning to contribute to these ends by practising, reflecting, practising and more practising until it becomes second nature! Of course, there is more time to achieve this if you start before the crisis hits.

Conclusions:

I have canvassed the importance of acquiring the kind of all-round human excellence of collective and individual character — “virtue” and good culture — that will maximise the chances of responding well when a crisis plunges you into radically unfamiliar circumstances. It is disappointing that more attention has not been paid to these, and to how to develop them, in discussions of how to respond to the current crisis, and how we ought to prepare ourselves and our organisations for potential further shocks in the future.

I have sounded a cautious note about some of the most frequently-touted recommendations for individual and collective adaptability. But of course, in reality, a crisis will not change absolutely everything. Some organisations’ formulations of purpose, mission, strategy, values and strategy will remain viable, as will some other recipes for adaptation, such as careful adherence to decision-making and risk-mitigation processes. In other words, some “narrow” dispositions to succeed will still work in a crisis. But it will be hard to predict which will and which won’t. And that in itself underlines the need for the most robust kind of adaptability possible, i.e. that founded on “broad-based” dispositions to make the right responses, decisions and actions, even when circumstances have changed beyond recognition. Such dispositions are delivered above all by good character and culture.

Thanks to Dan Connors, Tom Hancocks, Josh Hobbs, and Sean Sinclair for comments and suggestions to improve this piece.