Crises represent an increasingly prevalent conceptualisation of organisational challenges, encompassing such wide-ranging subjects as pandemics, international conflicts, economics, social discord, and learning outcomes in education. However, there is often some ambiguity regarding precisely why a certain challenge might constitute a crisis. Accordingly, there is a multitude of competing crisis definitions focusing on organisational threats, disruptions, uncertainty, unexpectedness, and several other criteria. These variable understandings necessarily lead to variable ideas of what crisis leadership entails. 

Based on a review of existing literature outlining definitions of crises as well as insights from empirical material gathered from Finnish and Swedish higher education, we propose a unified model of crisis conceptualisation applicable to any context, any challenge, and any analytical level. Centred on a set of three overarching variables – severity, urgency, and resilience – we outline a perspective of crisis as a continuum of challenges that exceed, or are perceived to exceed, the ability to manage them.  

This perspective abstracts conventional conceptualisations of individual crises into triggers of crisis conditions, shifting the analytical perspective towards crisis leadership and management processes rather than attempting to trace and untangle what is often a complex web of interlocking situations. The model thus provides an analytical tool for approaching studies of potential, on-going, or past crises or challenges encompassing both education and other contexts – developed from and tested against empirical situations in Nordic higher education. The model also has clear implications, and provides practical tools, for those involved in crisis leadership, such as facilitating responses that account for the intertwining of context, scale, and level of analysis (individual-global) when conducting crisis planning and responses.   

The purpose of this session is to test our model of crisis conceptualisation against a variety of perspectives and possible scenarios, evaluating its logical consistency, comprehensiveness, and analytical utility – as well as initiating and facilitating an in-depth discussion of how crises and challenges, ranging in scale from individual to global, can be understood and approached from a leadership perspective in both education and other contexts.  

To fulfil this purpose, this interactive session will start with an introduction of the proposed model by the chairs and its implications for crisis leadership.  This will be followed by an open discussion that includes all participants about potential refinement and utility of the model for understanding crisis, and especially crisis leadership, in educational contexts as well as other reflections on crises and organisational challenges as empirical phenomena and analytical perspectives. During this discussion, session participants will also be encouraged to contribute issues relating to their own experiences and work surrounding crises or related conditions in education or other contexts – or to suggest competing models of crisis conceptualisation and definition.