Crisis Leadership When the Playbook Fails: Dutch Leonard’s Framework, Six Years Later

In March 2020, days into the first COVID-19 lockdowns, Harvard Business School put Professor Dutch Leonard on its Managing Through Crisis webcast to answer the question every executive was suddenly asking: how do you lead when nobody knows what to do?

I recently went back and rewatched that conversation. Six years on, it is the cleanest crisis leadership framework I know of that fits in 25 minutes. Dutch lectured during my time in Harvard’s National Preparedness Leadership Initiative, and his thinking has shaped how I approach this work ever since. What he laid out in that episode was not pandemic commentary. It was doctrine. And it holds up.

Here is what he said, and what I think leaders should do with it.

Routine Emergencies Have Playbooks. True Crises Don’t.

Leonard’s foundational move is a distinction most organizations still have not internalized: the difference between a routine emergency and a true crisis.

A routine emergency is an event your organization has seen before, or close enough. A well-trained, well-resourced team has a playbook. The challenge is execution: doing the known thing quickly and well.

A true crisis contains enough novelty that the playbook is invalidated. Nobody has the script, because the script was never written. The moment novelty enters, the challenge shifts from execution to real-time innovation. Leonard’s definition of crisis leadership is the sharpest I have encountered: “rapid innovation, under stress, embedded in fear.”

Most crisis management programs are built entirely for the first category. The plans, the annexes, the call trees: all of it assumes the event has been imagined in advance. That work matters. But it is not what gets you through the event that was never imagined.

Old View	New View
Crisis management is executing the plan	Crisis management is solving problems the plan never imagined
The value lives in the documents	The value lives in the team’s problem-solving capability
The leader’s job is to give fast answers	The leader’s job is to run a process that finds answers
Priorities are traded off in advance	Novel crises collide priorities you have never had to rank before

That last row deserves attention. Leonard points out that true crises force trade-offs between things you have never had to weigh against each other. Keep the schools open or protect community health. Preserve the quarter or protect the workforce. No plan pre-resolves those collisions, because the collision itself is new.

A Crisis Leadership Framework Built on Process, Not Answers

Leonard describes a crisis as “a fountain of issues and questions and decisions and competing priorities.” You cannot pre-answer a fountain. What you can build, in advance, is the process that answers it in real time.

His prescription is one team, deliberately composed, charged with owning the whole issue set. Three groups belong in that room:

1. People who represent the organization’s competing values and interests. Not just senior leadership. If your workforce has different concerns than your executives, and it does, someone in the room has to carry them.
2. People who understand the event. Internal experts, outside advisors, or simply someone assigned to track what is actually known versus assumed.
3. People who deeply understand how the business works. The ones who know which capability is scarce, which process is fragile, and which three people hold the institutional knowledge that nothing else replaces.

This is the strongest argument for deliberate crisis team design I have seen. Most rosters I review over-index on the third group, thin out the second, and skip the first entirely. Then the exercise reveals it: the team optimizes for operations while the workforce, customer, and reputational equities go unrepresented until they become the story.

Once the team is in the room, the work is iteration. Assess the situation. Generate options. Pick one. Act. Evaluate. Repeat. Leonard calls this learning your way forward, and he attaches a discipline to it that most teams miss: treat every action as tentative and reversible. You are not issuing final answers. You are running experiments at speed, and you keep the ones that work.

The Communication Standard: Brutal Honesty Plus Grounded Hope

For communication, Leonard reaches for the Stockdale paradox: in the hardest circumstances, leaders must be brutally honest about what is happening and simultaneously offer hope. Neither alone works. Honesty without hope collapses morale. Hope without honesty is spin, and your people will detect it within one news cycle.

The discipline is that the hope must be grounded in something real. Not “we will be fine,” but “here is the capability we have, here is the process we are running, and here is why that process will find the path.” You can also be honest about fallibility. Leonard’s framing: we will make mistakes, perfection is not on offer, and what we promise instead is that we will learn as fast as anyone can.

That is a communicable standard. Most crisis communications plans do not contain it. They contain templates.

The Pitfall: Premature Decisiveness

The most counterintuitive point in the conversation is about decisiveness. Our default model of the strong leader is prompt and decisive: bring me the problem, I will give you the call. Leonard’s warning is that in a novel crisis, this instinct actively hurts you. Nobody knows the answer yet. A leader who manufactures confident answers early, to look like a leader, locks the organization into a current understanding right when the understanding is weakest.

Resisting that pressure is itself a leadership skill, and it can be practiced. It looks like framing early decisions explicitly as experiments. It sounds like “here is what we are trying, here is what would make us change course.” Decisive about the process. Provisional about the answers.

What to Do With This

Four moves, all executable this quarter:

1. Audit your crisis team roster against Leonard’s three groups. Name who carries the workforce’s equities, who owns event intelligence, and who holds deep operational knowledge. If a group is missing, fix the roster before the next activation.
2. Redesign your next tabletop exercise to test novelty, not execution. An exercise that walks the team through the plan validates the wrong thing. Inject a scenario element the plan never imagined, then watch whether the team can run a problem-solving cycle without it. That is the capability that survives contact with a real crisis.
3. Train the iteration loop until it is muscle memory. Situation, options, decision, review, repeat. Put it on the wall of the room where your team convenes. Teams that have rehearsed the loop run it under stress. Teams that have not, freeze or thrash.
4. Write the Stockdale standard into your crisis communications doctrine. Every leader statement in a crisis carries both halves: the honest read of reality, and hope grounded in a real capability or process. Pre-wire your communicators on this before you need them.

Plans fail on contact with novelty. Process survives it. Build the process.

Keep Going

A few ways to go deeper if this was useful.

• Read more. Resilience, crisis management, and continuity writing at Bryghtpath Insights, or the structured Ultimate Guide to Crisis Management.
• Test for novelty, not execution. Exercise in a Day®️  builds and runs a full tabletop exercise in a single day, designed to stress your team’s problem-solving process rather than walk through the binder.
• Get a maturity score. Our Resiliency Diagnosis® is a standards-based review that produces a maturity score and a prioritized roadmap.
• Talk to us. Set up a call to think through your program with us.