In the past five years, Australia has endured two catastrophic bushfire seasons, at least four major flooding events, one human biosecurity emergency in the form of a global pandemic, and recurring heatwaves that have broken records and placed communities under sustained stress. If it feels like a lot, that’s because it is. 

What’s more, it’s only going to continue. Indeed, emergency management organisations widely consider it to be the new normal. 

Throughout this period of rolling crisis, Nous has been working alongside senior leaders in emergency management organisations across Australia. We have also had the opportunity to think hard about what worked and what didn’t through our work evaluating the response to major events including Australia’s Black Summer.  

Our emergency management team brings a wealth of international experience to our work. Members of our team have studied, collaborated with, and learned from emergency management leaders across the globe. This exposure has provided us with firsthand insight into how different countries approach crisis management and resilience, and these experiences continue to shape how we support organisations through periods of emergency and recovery. 

One constant across events and places is the unique importance of leadership and the unique challenges for leaders in emergency management organisations where moving in and out of crisis is the norm.  

As Ronald Heifetz, Alexander Grashow and Marty Linsky once wrote in the Harvard Business Review, there are two distinct phases that emergency management leaders need to operate in: The crisis phase which we might call response, relief, and early recovery; and the adaptive phase, which we might call recovery and prevention and risk reduction or better, resilience.   

The phases call for different leadership.  

The crisis phase is about stabilising the situation and buying time, saving lives and livelihoods in the process. People will look to leaders to provide decisiveness and direction and to provide reassurance and a show of confidence in our capacity to respond.  

The adaptive phase is about what comes next. A crisis will often expose some vulnerability that needs to be addressed. Reform, organisational restructuring, or new investment may be needed. The task of leaders is to create the conditions for people to understand reality, navigate uncertainty, and guide people through discomfort and change, while holding steady to purpose and progress. 

We have observed that many leaders in emergency management organisations excel in the crisis phase. They are comfortable in chaos, are able to make tough decisions quickly, communicate calmly, and create a sense of safety and order even when the situation is unpredictable. This isn’t always true, and we can all conjure images of the leaders who have failed to meet the moment. But when they get it right, we see a leader who is trusted and respected by the community and can deliver better responses because of this.  

Their colleagues make it easy for them too. During an emergency we consistently hear that collaboration becomes easier, resources suddenly become available, and people go above and beyond.  

But when the fires have been dowsed or the flood waters receded, moving to the adaptive phase can be difficult. For one, the aftermath of an emergency is often characterised by some sort of inquiry into the event and the response to it. Inquiries of this sort are critical to give us insights that help us learn and improve. Too often, however, they are a blame game, which forgets that in the world of emergency response the goal is a less bad outcome, not a good one. Communities in pain want simple narratives and can be quick to make crisis leaders the villain. Inquiries can keep leaders in the crisis phase and prevent them from moving to the adaptive phase, or can drive them out of their organisations and the sector all together.  

When they move past the inquiry leaders often find the adaptive phase less comfortable. Where the leader is a trusted authority staff will look to them to have the answers or deliver a quick fix. But adaptive challenges don’t have easy answers.  

They may find that the skills that serve them so well during the crisis are of no use for adaptive work and may hinder it. For example, the capacity to make quick decisions with limited information can mean leaders fail to recognise the important work of deeply understanding the challenge they face.  

Adaptive work is hard, and leaders may need new tools to do it. A five step approach inspired by adaptive leadership might help: 

  1. Do the diagnostic work. We need to first understand the challenge. What is the gap between our aspirations and reality? For emergency management leaders the question to ask is: “Are we ready for the next event?” 
  2. Understand your place in the system. You will have sources of formal and informal authority in the system. The questions to ask are: “Where am I placed and therefore how should I act? What are my sources of formal and informal authority?” 
  3. Understand what needs to change. Adaptive work is about sifting through the organisation or the system to understand what to preserve, discard, and grow. Some elements of the organisational DNA, which may be highly valued by people, may still need to be left behind. For emergency management leaders, the question to ask could be: “Given our changing climate, given shifting demographics, and given the changes in the community’s expectations of us, what about our organisation no longer works?” To be provocative, a leader might consider questions like: “Does a local government leadership model still serve us or is the capacity just not there?" or “Is our model of volunteering still a strength or has it become outdated?” 
  4. Keep teams in the productive zone. Change is uncomfortable. Without a sense of urgency, difficult adaptation is unlikely. But if the pressure is too great, people may fight, flee, or freeze. The art of leadership is to keep teams in a “productive zone of disequilibrium” creating enough discomfort to drive change, but not so much that it becomes destructive. The question to ask is: “How can I distribute losses at a rate people can handle?”
  5. Stay anchored. Adaptive work can challenge your sense of self. It is critical to remain grounded by your purpose and your values. The question to ask is: “Why do I do what I do?” For emergency management leaders, this is easy, as the sense of purpose is a constant. The challenge is taking time to recommit to it.  

This is the real work of leadership. It's no longer enough, if it ever was, for emergency management leaders to be crisis leaders. In a world of cascading, compounding, and concurrent disasters, we need to adapt. 

Get in touch to discuss how you can set your emergency management organisation up for success in an age of rolling crises.

Connect with Milly Bell and Christie Allison on LinkedIn.