A client of mine sat across from me last week and said, "I know the plan. I just don't trust it anymore." The situation had moved faster than the plan had been written for, and he was discovering something most leaders eventually discover: the crisis plan tells you what to do. It says nothing about who you need to be while you're doing it.

We spend a lot of energy preparing organisations for crisis and comparatively little preparing the leader inside it. That is a gap worth closing, because the two are not the same problem.

Not every disruption calls for the same response. A clear problem has a known fix. A complicated one needs expert analysis. But a genuinely complex situation, where cause and effect only become visible in hindsight, requires something else entirely: experimentation, fast learning, and the discipline to keep adjusting. The Cynefin framework makes this distinction well, and one pattern I have noticed in coaching is leaders reaching for yesterday's playbook when the situation has already changed shape.

Before you can lead a crisis, you have to lead yourself. That is the core insight in Paul Ingram's crisis leadership work at Columbia Business School, built around three interconnected layers: leading self, leading others, leading the organisation.

The first layer, leading yourself, starts with a question. The instinct under pressure is to jump straight to strategy. What are we going to do? But a prior question does more work: what will guide me when there is no obvious answer? Ingram's work points to values, not as posters on a wall, but as a functioning decision system. Values only prove themselves when they cost something, when two priorities collide, when the commercially attractive option sits uncomfortably next to what you believe responsible leadership requires.

I ask executives four questions in these moments:

  • What are you trying to protect?
  • What principle are you unwilling to compromise?
  • Whose interests need to be weighed in this decision?
  • What do you want people to remember about how you led through it?

For me, that changes what decisiveness looks like: the ability to take a clear position and move people forward with incomplete information, while staying anchored enough to change course when the evidence shifts.

The second layer, leading others, is where control becomes the trap. Pressure tempts senior leaders to tighten their grip at exactly the moment the organisation needs more information reaching them, not less. Ingram's work on an organisation's "invisible structure" is instructive here. The org chart shows who reports to whom. It does not show who people trust, who holds the information everyone else is missing, or where uncomfortable news stops travelling upward. A crisis exposes those gaps fast. The question worth sitting with is simple: when pressure rises, do you become more directive, or more curious? Strong leadership needs both and knowing which moment calls for which is the actual skill.

The third layer, leading the organisation, brings us to an important tension: you cannot predict the crisis. You can still prepare for it. Ingram and Captain Matthew Feeley's Operation Tomodachi case, developed after the 2011 Japan earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear emergency, captures this well: leaders who could not foresee the specifics still learned to "prepare to improvise." That means building several plausible scenarios rather than one forecast, and then asking the harder question underneath them: what can we control, what can we influence, and what sits entirely outside our reach?

It also means deciding, before the pressure arrives, what evidence would change your mind. What customer signal would concern you. What financial threshold matters. What would tell you the plan needs to shift, before sunk cost and politics start making that call for you.

The uncertainty remains. What changes is our capacity to function inside it: to reduce twenty urgent issues to the four or five that matter, to create enough psychological safety that someone will tell you your assumptions are wrong, and to change direction without losing credibility for having done so.

You may not know what the next crisis will look like. You can decide what kind of leader you want to be when it arrives.

What would you need to know about yourself now, to lead well when certainty disappears?