Year: 2024
Type: article
Abstract: How can we understand the demands on leaders who will have to deal with extreme events that have not occurred before? This is becoming increasingly important as organizations need support to prepare for unknown, unprecedented, and unimaginable events. In a workshop with a police incident command team, we explore how extreme fiction—radically imaginative narratives of accidents, crises, and disasters—can help. To do this, we conducted a workshop with the team, responding to a scene from the apocalyptic television series The Walking Dead . We make two contributions. First, we show how extreme fiction can help to reimagine assumptions about crisis leadership. Specifically, we find that crisis leadership can benefit from weaknesses as it increases the response approach. Second, we find that extreme fiction creates engagement and reduces the reliance on simple, formulaic solutions that may be of little use in the future. This helps practitioners prepare and build resilience for handling surprising, unimaginable extreme events.
Source: Management Learning
Authors: Markus Hällgren, David A Buchanan
Institutions: Umeå University, Cranfield University
Language: English
Subfield: Communication
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid: $3,700
Funder: Riksbankens Jubileumsfond
OpenAlex ID: W4401463118