In Extremis Leaders Embrace Continuous Learning

In extremis situations demand an outward or learning orientation, and this orientation is also heightened by threat. This is a new variation, but is similar in some ways to a well-established concept in the management literature. In a widely cited article in the Journal of Management Studies, noted author Karl Weick refers to an outward focus on crisis as enacted sense making. Weick recognized the dynamic between the excitement people feel in crisis and the need for the leader to add further excitement to the crisis: "Sensemaking in crisis conditions is made more difficult because action that is instrumental to understanding the crisis also intensifies the crisis." Therefore, it is more important for people in in extremis contexts to focus outward and learn than it is for them to add excitement to the situation through motivation. Weick goes on, "People enact the environments that constrain them... Commitment, capacity, and expectations affect sensemaking during crisis and the severity of the crisis itself."⁴

Thus, in extremis leaders need to focus outward on the environment to make sense of it and can actually make matters worse by intensifying people’s fear by trying to motivate them. To Weick, this phenomenon was evidenced in crisis. In extremis leaders are routinely and willingly in circumstances that novices would label as crises, and my findings suggest that Weick’s earlier work may help inform leadership in dangerous settings as well as in organizational crises. Such a parallel will be particularly important in Chapter Two, which directly compares leadership in dangerous situations with conventional business settings.

Note:

4. K. Weick, “Enacted Sensemaking in Crisis Situations,” Journal of Management Studies, 1988, 25, 305–317.