Whether confronting systemic risks like climate change, industry-wide disruption or sudden geopolitical shifts, today’s leaders face problems that no single entity can resolve alone. The question is not whether to act but how to act collectively – with others who may not share your incentives, timelines or authority. These challenges are complex, interconnected and beyond the control of any single organisation. They demand not only individual leadership but also collective action: coordinated efforts across sectors, boundaries and interests to achieve shared outcomes.
These themes are at the heart of a recent Organization Studies special issue I co-edited with Professor Martin Kornberger, Professor Renate Meyer, Professor Ignasi Martí, Dr Corinna Frey-Heger and Professor Joep Cornelissen – a group of colleagues from across Europe with deep expertise in organisational theory and crisis response. The special issue surfaces valuable insights for any leader grappling with complexity, pressure and interdependence, drawing on real-world examples from emergency responses to global pandemics and political instability.
What can business leaders learn from these cases? While each context is distinct, three themes stand out: how we prepare, how we interpret events and how we structure decision-making collectively. Together, these themes offer a more grounded way of thinking about leadership in a crisis-prone world – not as a heroic act of command but as the ongoing work of enabling action with and through others.
1. Design routines for the unexpected
One insight from the special issue is that high-performing teams in extreme contexts – such as firefighting or emergency medicine – invest heavily in routines. These are not rigid protocols but structured ways of working that provide enough stability to allow for improvisation when events diverge from the expected.
Effective routines serve two purposes. First, they allow diverse actors to coordinate quickly under pressure. Second, they prevent paralysis by offering a shared starting point for action. But there is a balance to strike. Routines that are too narrow can make teams blind to new threats, while ones that are too open can lead to drift and confusion.
Research in the special issue examines how the Uganda Red Cross managed a two-year Ebola response – a complex, high-stakes operation. They had to keep long-term processes like funding and logistics running while reacting fast to urgent issues like border screening. They did this by adjusting the timing of different routines to fit what was needed at the moment – a practice the researchers call temporal manipulation. The result was a flexible but reliable response, sustained over time.
Key takeaway: Well-designed routines provide a structured approach that helps prevent paralysis in crisis while remaining flexible enough to support improvisation when the situation demands it.
2. Make sense of crisis – but remain open to reframing
High-performing teams stand out in a crisis because they can quickly adapt how they understand and respond to changing situations. Previous research considered in the special issue introduction explores how NASA emergency response units and aircraft carrier flight deck crews foster what’s known as “heedful interrelating”: a culture of shared attentiveness and mutual trust that enables quick adaptation. These teams rely on flexible rules, defer to expertise and treat assumptions as provisional, allowing them to improvise as events unfold. Instead of locking into one explanation, they stay alert to new information and adjust their thinking as the situation evolves.
When this process fails, the consequences can be tragic. One example – explored in earlier research by Professor Joep Cornelissen, co-editor of this special issue – is the 2005 shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes, a Brazilian man mistakenly identified as a suicide bomber by London’s Metropolitan Police. In the heightened threat environment after the 7/7 attacks, officers quickly settled on a mistaken assumption. That framing shaped every subsequent action, even as contradictory evidence emerged. Leaders failed to create space for revision or dissent. The result was not only a loss of life but a broader collapse in public trust.
The Notre-Dame fire in 2019 offers a compelling counterexample. As the blaze spread rapidly through the cathedral’s roof, standard firefighting procedures initially suggested letting the building collapse in a controlled way to avoid further harm. But firefighters on the ground – aware of the building’s symbolic importance – sensed more was at stake. Drawing on subtle cues and collaborative exchanges, they decided to pivot and save the structure’s iconic towers. Their actions were not simply instinctive. As the authors explain, they drew on shared routines. Still, they adapted them in flight through senselistening: an attentiveness to weak signals, emotion and frontline expertise that enabled collective reorientation in real-time.
Key takeaway: Successful crisis response depends not only on speed but also on the shared ability to interpret events flexibly and adapt as new information emerges.
3. Share power to accelerate decision-making
Finally, leadership in crisis often hinges on the distribution of power. Traditional hierarchies can be too slow, rigid, or detached from frontline reality. Organisations that operate in high-stakes environments frequently empower those closest to the situation to make critical calls.
However, decentralisation only works when there is trust, training and clarity about who holds authority and under what conditions. Without this, power vacuums or rigid structures can paralyse decision-making. When researching refugee camps in Rwanda, colleagues and I found that the transnational institutions intended to coordinate responses became barriers to action. Rather than empowering local actors, the system fragmented authority across agencies, with overlapping mandates and accountability. The result was delay, frustration and reduced capacity to meet the needs of displaced people.
The ability to self-organise under pressure underscores how distributing power can enable fast, practical action during a crisis. When cities such as Vienna began to experience thousands of people crossing their borders daily with little warning during the 2015 refugee crisis, what enabled a rapid response was not a detailed plan but the ability of local actors – from public agencies to grassroots groups – to share power and accelerate decision-making by drawing on familiar action patterns. Officials, volunteers and civil society leaders shared knowledge from previous experiences that their collaborators could learn from and adapt to meet the emerging needs of the situation. In contrast, where authorities tried to impose bureaucratic procedures or waited for central guidance, the result was often delay, confusion and mistrust.
Key takeaway: In crisis, leadership means empowering those with the most relevant expertise – whether technical or rooted in cultural context – to raise concerns and quickly make decisions.
Leading beyond the organisation
None of this is simple. Collective action doesn’t just happen because people agree. It often means working across different priorities, conflicting operating methods and existing power structures. But making sense of these challenges – and knowing how to navigate them – is a crucial part of leadership today.
Crises will continue to test our capacity to act together. The leaders best prepared to meet the challenge will be those who don’t just lead within their own walls – but know how to enable others to act across systems, sectors and fault lines. Collective action is not just a theoretical concern. It is an urgent, practical challenge for leadership in a world where no one can lead alone.
Marian Gatzweiler is our Senior Lecturer in Organisation and Management Control.