Brightline II: The Wisdom of Crises

Lessons from crisis management to strengthen strategy implementation in technology organizations

A survey by HBR and Brightline in 2018 highlighted that agile executors, organizations that respond quickly to changes in markets, competitors, or customer needs, tend to fare best when it comes to successful strategy implementation. Intriguingly, these agile executors share some striking similarities with organizational structures of well-managed crises.

When an organization enters crisis mode – and almost all organizations do when facing a substantial crisis – their way of doing business changes. Typical for organizations that emerge strengthened from a crisis are shifts in characteristics towards those reported for agile executors: high flexibility, trusted leader figures, high goal alignment, effective communication, and decisive and empowered employees across the (crisis) organization.

Building on insights from crisis research, we developed in this project a model how organizations can improve their handling of surprises in their strategy work, so that minor surprises do not grow into major crises. The model looks at surprise management as a process that flows through four phases: planning, noticing, understanding, and responding. Moreover, it provides a frame to organizational characteristics that enable or block a speedy and effective handling of the surprise.

The outcome of the research has been developed in a workbook for organizations, to run workshops on their internal management of surprises in strategic initiatives, and several practitioner oriented publications on the London School of Economics Blog.