The Art of Lead­er­ship in Crisis

Course content

The opening decades of the twenty first century have been dominated with a series of crises: natural crisis, energy crisis, financial crisis, resource scarcity, refugee crisis, pandemics and ecological crisis. The ability to lead organizations through severe and unprecedented crises has become a critical core competency. But what if these crises were not separate and limited but interlinked and ongoing? How can leadership respond to a deepening and perpetual permacrisis? Many of our existing theories of organization and management are simply not fit for the task of addressing generalized permacrises. We need to challenge existing paradigms, leadership and organizational approaches in order to build new organizational thinking to understand the challenges we are living in. In this course, we will develop critical thinking to approach the crisis within organizations and develop competences in understanding contemporary and future challenges. 

Contemporary approaches to organization and leadership often assume ideas around stability and progress, where a better future can be imagined on the basis of memories of some aspects of the past. Generations born either side of the millennium face an uncertain and unpredictable future and have no memory of a world that was not confronting one crisis or another. This course will focus on the lived experience of working, living and leading through crisis. It will explore organizations from the inside – what it feels like to be in the crush zone of managing crisis, how to handle ethical dilemmas when there are competing and irreconcilable values, the challenges of developing strategy when the future is difficult to imagine. To do this, the course will use films and documentaries as primary resources. Each week students and staff will watch a different movie together which will form the basis for the class discussions. The assessment will also be based around the production of a creative product, such as a short video or curated set of images which will demonstrate ways of understanding crisis from the inside.

The course will be structured around a series of dimensions through which crisis is experienced: health, wellbeing and psychological safety; justice, diversities and equality; sustainability, species responsibilities and environmental anxiety; organizational memory and imagined futures. These dimensions reflect the reality that many existing organizational functions, such as Occupational Safety & Health, Equality Diversity and Inclusion, and Sustainability, can no longer be meaningfully separated. The existing and emerging permacrises faced by organizations combine many issues together in a way that is not currently well addressed in contemporary theories of management and organization. The ability to lead through permacrisis will fundamentally involve creative thinking across existing organizational divisions and functions.

This course aims to teach students the skills, critical thinking and theoretical knowledge needed to lead changes and address crisis within organizations. In that process, students will engage with theories and practices related to organization theory, leadership, well-being, new business models and ethics to think within dilemmas. Studentswill learn how to make decisions and face ethical dilemmas in critical situations.