Leadership through Crisis: Decision-Making When the Stakes Are High

This course is built for people who have been in the room when things go wrong — and who want to be better prepared next time. It is not a theoretical survey of crisis management literature. It is a structured, evidence-grounded programme designed for experienced professionals who already know that crises are messy, ambiguous, and unforgiving of poor preparation. The course draws on the strongest available research — Gary Klein's work on naturalistic decision-making, Karl Weick's sensemaking theory, James Reason's systems approach to failure, Sidney Dekker's just culture framework, and Arjen Boin and colleagues' crisis leadership model — but every idea is stress-tested against real events: Grenfell Tower, Fukushima Daiichi, the Thai cave rescue, the Australian Black Summer bushfires, and critical aviation incidents. The eight-chapter arc follows the lifecycle of a crisis, from recognising that you are actually in one, through the brutal first minutes of activation, into the cognitive and communicative demands of sustained response, and finally into the often-neglected work of learning and preparing for the next event. But this is not a linear march. Key concepts — sensemaking, cognitive load, stakeholder dynamics, systemic failure — are deliberately revisited across chapters with increasing complexity, because that is how professionals build durable expertise. Each chapter includes interactive simulations that put you in the decision seat, not as a spectator but as the person who must act with incomplete information under real time pressure. The pedagogical design embeds five evidence-based learning principles throughout: spaced retrieval of core concepts across chapters, interleaving of related ideas from different response domains, active recall before new material is presented, concrete case studies grounding every abstraction, and dual coding through interactive visual tools alongside written analysis. The tone is direct. The examples are real. The goal is not to produce people who can recite crisis theory, but professionals who can lead effectively when everything around them is failing.

8 Chapters · 67 Sources

Leadership through Crisis: Decision-Making When the Stakes Are High

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