ABSTRACT
This is a world in which leaders need to act quickly in order to stabilise the situation, then take stock of their actions afterwards. If leadership can promote constructive learning from crises the learning process can also have a healing effect on teams and stakeholders. Crises exhibit the same kind of emergent patterns that we see in any complex adaptive system, but they escalate very quickly and have much wider ramifications. Co-ordinating involves aligning all the key players in a co-ordinated effort to address the crisis. Decision-making may be viewed as the process of reducing the gap between the existing situation and the desired situation through solving problems and making use of opportunities. While managing emergent risks, it is very easy to lose focus on what can be seen as non-core activities, such as communication. The aftermath of a crisis can become dominated by desire to allocate blame and there a real trade-off between blaming and learning can occur.
