Post-acute crisis leadership

ANZSOG held a Post-Acute Crisis masterclass series led by crisis leadership expert, Professor Paul ‘t Hart, in June 2020. The series explored the post-acute phase of crises, including the COVID-19 crisis and provided participants with the opportunity to enhance their understanding of crisis lesson drawing, designing and managing crisis evaluations, and avoiding common errors.

The series was an extension of ANZSOG’s Leading in a crisis series, which explored crisis management, leadership and communications in relation to the COVID-19 pandemic, and put global expertise in the hands of public managers in Australia and New Zealand.

It is an opportunity for select groups of senior public sector leaders to reflect on and discuss world leading crisis leadership research with academics expert in government and crisis response. Importantly, the masterclass series will connect and engage public sector leaders across both Australia and New Zealand.

This series involves three masterclasses led by crisis leadership expert, Professor Paul ‘t Hart, along with contributors to ANZSOG’s Leading in a crisis series, offering:

  • leading research insights about the patterns, pitfalls and potential of learning from crises, presented by leading crisis management experts: Professor Eric Stern (State University of New York), Professor Arjen Boin (Leiden University, the Netherlands), Robbie Macpherson (Managing Director, Adaptable Leadership)
  • facilitation and reflections on learning in and from the COVID-19 crisis by Professor Paul 't Hart (Utrecht University), who has been studying, educating and advising crisis leaders in Europe and Australia for over 35 years
  • hands-on experiences and practical wisdom from public leaders and public sector reformers who have navigated and learned from major crises (to be announced).
  • and an opportunity to marry the theory of crisis leadership with the lived practice in the current crisis.

Participants in the Post-Acute Crisis masterclass series gained exclusive access to three papers which are now publicly available.

 ANZSOG post-acute leadership paper (pdf) docx

See below for a summary of the three masterclasses which accompanied each paper.

Learning well from crisis – how do we orchestrate this?

With Paul ‘t Hart and Eric Stern

Major crises are not just big threats and big disruptors, they are also stress tests for the communities and institutions that are affected by them. How crises happen and how we respond to and recover from them can reveal important things about ourselves, our systems, policies and practices.

COVID-19 is a case in point, revealing much about levels of institutional preparedness, societal and organisational resilience, and governmental crisis response capacities. When we identify and process those insights carefully, we can learn to cope better with this pandemic and other types of future mega-crises.

The question is: how can we organise and protect the work of learning in the high-stakes and politically volatile post-crisis context?

Post-crisis reform – recovery, transformation and opportunity

With Paul ‘t Hart and Arjen Boin

Never waste a good crisis, or so the saying goes. Major crises are not just big threats, they also offer opportunities for change - especially for change that has been coveted for a long time but was never possible before.

Even as lockdowns were being put in place to counter COVID-19, talk about how this crisis could be used to forge breakthroughs in areas such as e-health, online education and aged care began almost immediately. Astute policy advocacy or naïve optimism? History certainly gives us examples of major reforms that were enacted in the wake of a crisis, but research suggests that many such attempts falter.

In this masterclass, we discuss the nature and limits of crises as ‘windows of opportunity’, and explore the success and failure of crisis exploitation strategies. We offer the outlines of an approach that will help leaders decide whether a crisis at hand can be leveraged to forge momentum for change or is best ridden out conservatively.

Adaptive leadership and how it is being reflected in the COVID-19 context

With Paul ‘t Hart and Robbie Macpherson

In a few intense months our societies have been massively disrupted in multiple ways. It remains uncertain what this will mean for our future. COVID-19 has elicited a remarkable upsurge of innovation, experimentation and temporary adaptation across communities, businesses and governments.

There is considerable optimism about this leading to permanent transformation of our organisations and our lives. Despite what we like to think 'in the moment', all too often good intentions and commitments slowly dissipate as our systems edge back to a familiar equilibrium. If transformation and adaptation are to be 'locked in', they will have to be actively generated and earned through purposeful and energetic leadership activities. In this masterclass we will begin by diagnosing our challenge, undertake sense-making, look at the traps to avoid, and ask what leadership practice is now required to help our organisations successfully adapt to meet the social, human and economic challenges we face.

The urgency of this moment is considerable, as organisations struggle with the tension for the desire for a return to a familiar Normal and the need for the right injection of New thinking, practice and norms.