Shock Leadership: Leading Amidst Pandemics and Other Chaotic Change

Introduction

Over the past two decades, amid the continually disruptive environment of the fourth industrial revolution (Industry 4.0), the world has become accustomed to the continuous technological change and the related effects that the rapid technological advancements and roll-outs have on businesses, including positive and negative outcomes. The world has grown used to the need for fast and repeated change, and businesses and other organizations have changed the way that they deal with market competitiveness that comes with Industry 4.0, often predicting the shifts and building change into their strategies (Shufutinsky et al., 2020a; 2020b). Despite this acclimation to rapid and continuous change, the level of adaptation and response to massive and highly disruptive events is different and requires a different response. Situations, events, or scenarios that have a strong disruptive effect and jolt entire systems are often classified as crises or disasters, and they are not endemic only to government agencies and nations, but can and do have serious implications for all sectors, including communities, non-profits, small businesses, learning institutions, and corporations, among others. These scenarios can range in type from natural disasters, to man-made disasters, to political and economic collapses, and can last for any span of time, ranging from days to months or even years (Dayton, 2015; Shufutinsky et al., 2020a). In 2020, the world was turned upside down by a series of highly disruptive events, creating an environment of increasing complexity relative to national security, personal safety, public health, employment, global transportation, and economics (Burrell, 2020; Shufutinsky et al., 2020; Triggs & Kharas, 2020), and with this complexity comes uncertainty, volatility, and ambiguity (VUCA) regarding the current and future state of organizations, communities, and nations (Shufutinsky et al., 2020).

Warren Bennis (2007), one of the most respected minds regarding business, management, and leadership, wrote that, among the threats to this world, two of the main threats to stability are leadership during increased globalization, and pandemics. Pandemics, already known to be highly problematic to stability from a public health perspective, have significant potential for driving organizations, communities, nations, and entire populations into a jolted environment, bringing whole systems to increased levels of VUCA. The world has witnessed this in 2020, exemplified by the global spread of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19), and simultaneous, compounding international crises occurring, including agricultural plagues, political conflict in different parts of the world, continued racism and race-related violence, terrorism, rioting, massive wildfires, disastrous weather events, and the varying effectiveness of responses to these scenarios. It has become apparent that Warren Bennis’ hypotheses pertaining to these two threats of inadequate leadership and pandemics are not mutually exclusive, and that the overlap of leadership in the context of increased globalization, during the coronavirus pandemic, has destabilized many systems in this interconnected global society (Shufutinsky et al., 2020a). International criticism continues to mount regarding management of the pandemic by national, state, & local government as well as corporate and medical leaders, as they scramble to respond (Shear et al., 2020; Walker, 2020) to the discontinuously changing scenario. Presented here is an overview of the context in which this discontinuous change is evident, internationally. Also presented is an exploration of the leadership challenges that are associated with the VUCA-rich and chaotic COVID-19 environment. Amidst this unstable and complex environment of increased non-linear circumstances of crises, a particular kind of advanced leadership is needed—a leadership style that can display increased awareness, flexibility, adaptability, sense-making, and decision-making for comprehensively effective responses to whole system shock. This leadership style is termed Shock Leadership (Shufutinsky et al., 2020a).