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In a large organization, rapid, directed change is possible only in particular windows of opportunity. We refer to these windows as crises.
When we first set out to define crisis engineering, we immediately encountered a problem with nomenclature. “Crisis” evokes bad feelings. Organizational crises are generally quite unpleasant, but they don’t have to be. We’re going to argue they have a bad reputation because they are generally badly managed.
Many people pointed us to the Chinese characters 危機, which are variously translated as “danger,” “opportunity,” “disaster,” “crisis,” or “change point.” Taken together, they render as “Every crisis contains an opportunity,” or “My enemy’s danger is my opportunity,” or “Danger is the time of change.” The ambiguity encourages an expansive view of situations that have different combinations of danger and opportunity.
Then there is the ancient Greek κρίσις, which for centuries referred to the point in time at which either a fever would break, or a patient would succumb to disease. It’s too bad this usage is no longer in fashion, because it indicates that things may get worse but can also get better. That’s pretty close to “a window of opportunity that permits rapid, directed change.”
It seems a little too contrived to create a new word, so we will do the best we can with English. Thus, the word we are going to use is “crisis.”
The five crisis indicators
It is possible to wield and direct the heat of a crisis toward desirable change if you understand how and when. At the same time, some of the actions and models that work best in a crisis are useless, or worse, when not in crisis. The very first step in successful crisis engineering is the ability to tell whether you’re in a crisis at all.
A ripe crisis will exhibit most, if not all, of these five indicators:
- Fundamental surprise.
- Failure of sensemaking — perceptions break down, and existing maps and models don’t work.
- Degradation, disruption, or complete change of core processes or outcomes.
- High visibility — either internal to an organization, external to it, or both.
- Rigid deadline or timeframe.
Each makes it possible to take new actions and create new behavior.
Fundamental surprise
Any organization’s information-gathering, decision-making, and operational processes will work under most circumstances experienced in the past. Sometimes, they even cover a certain space of unprecedented circumstances and inputs. A fundamental surprise is an event or circumstance that violates the basic assumptions of an organization’s consensus reality. Consensus reality is the current belief of how things work, what is happening, how we are related to the people and systems around us, and why we are here.
An example from our own experience rescuing the HealthCare.gov website: “You are the Department of Health and Human Services, the second-largest federal agency in the United States, largely in the business of calculating and sending checks to citizens, doctors, and hospitals. Legislation orders you to build an online health insurance marketplace — something you have never done before.”
The Opportunity: Fundamental surprise forces people to accept new facts about reality.
Failure of sensemaking
In normal times, all organizations operate under a certain amount of self-delusion. A sure sign that a crisis has begun is when those illusions become unsustainable. Either information-gathering has broken down entirely, or the disconnect between expectation and reality has become too great for anyone to ignore. Channels for information flow can become useless noise. The rate of change can become so fast that information is too old to be useful by the time it arrives. Critical sensory information, like feelings, intuition, or context, can disappear from operations or decision-making.
A famous example of the breakdown of sensemaking was the Mann Gulch wildfire in Montana in 1949. Multiple mishaps and hazards conspired to undermine the fundamentals of the sense-making process. The radio broke. High winds made it impossible to hear. Well-tested assumptions about fire behavior were violated. In the end, the team was scattered and trapped on an inescapable ridge, where all but three of the firefighters died. The tragedy transformed Forest Service firefighting protocols.
The Opportunity: Failure of sensemaking creates a chance to build a new, shared, and more accurate understanding of what is really going on.
Degradation, disruption, or complete change of core processes or outcomes
The least ambiguous indicator of a crisis is the degradation, disruption, or replacement of an organization’s primary function. An organization’s primary function stops or is supplanted by some novel need. This is easiest to perceive in service organizations, infrastructure organizations, or platform providers. System failures ground all of an air carrier’s flights. An intruder freezes a business’s technological infrastructure. An automobile manufacturing behemoth must switch to building tanks. A bureau stops processing child welfare cases or unemployment claims, generating backlogs that grow without bound. A demand for a company’s product or service increases by two orders of magnitude in a short time. The organization has an inescapable need to accomplish some urgent task, which may be novel and requires behavior outside its historical norms.
Core disruption has a direct effect on decision-making and how an operator in the situation might take action. A fundamental disruption of an organization’s primary purpose drastically changes the impact of decisions. The consequences of decisions can now go far outside the usual range. The scope of a decision’s outcome can change entirely. Over just a few minutes in the Mann Gulch crisis, the stakes of an individual smoke jumper’s decisions escalated from “This fire could take a few extra hours” to “I may not survive.” Most did not.
The Opportunity: Broken core functions mean that meaningful change is no longer optional; it’s now required for continued existence.
High visibility
Increased visibility, either in scope or intensity, often accompanies crisis circumstances. It can be perpetrated by regulators, auditors, middle management, employees, media, and/or whistleblowers. It increases the pressure on decision-makers, operators, and a majority of the members of an organization. Awareness of widespread attention often slows decision-making, reduces the quality of internally reported information, and increases fear. Ironically, outside attention reduces appetite for risk at a time when the only hope of success is trying something new.
Canonical signposts of high visibility include a small number of topics (perhaps only one) dominating internal communications, or the organization being featured in the news on a weekly or daily basis.
The Opportunity: Increased visibility can force action, as the price of inaction grows unacceptably high. Decisions can have much greater impact.
Rigid deadline or timeframe
Most deadlines — and many so-called timing constraints — are more flexible than they appear. In practice, missing a deadline or product launch usually results in minor costs, a few extra meetings, or some internal finger-pointing — not a crisis. Even the IRS delays tax deadlines rather regularly. But some deadlines are truly fixed or nearly impossible to move. These kinds of constraints can be a significant contributing factor to a crisis.
Often, static deadlines result from physical constraints, as in aerospace applications, where launch windows are dictated by physics. They can also be imposed by higher-order control systems like courts, regulations, auditors, or financial systems. Sometimes previously negotiable timelines evolve into nonnegotiable ones, such as when progressing from a memorandum of understanding to a draft contract to a finalized and regulatory-approved merger, acquisition, or fundraising event.
Crises often impose nonnegotiable timing constraints that sharply reduce decision-making flexibility — for example, existential disruptions tied to immovable deadlines like a market opening or the close of an open-enrollment window. Extant or imminent failure in the face of a hard, nonnegotiable deadline is a clear hallmark of a useful crisis.
The Opportunity: Rigid timing constraints mean that decision-making timelines are compressed. Matters that used to take months to decide will now be settled in hours or minutes.
Not everything is a crisis
Phony crises are much more common than real ones. There are many bosses who like to see heroic efforts and try to generate them by turning everything into an emergency. There are also organizations where everyone, as a matter of culture, likes to pretend to be in crisis all the time. The case we get asked about most of all is when a bad situation is brewing from the bottom up: A system is failing, and no one seems to notice.
In such a situation, look at actions, not words. Was there really a fundamental surprise? Have core processes stopped working? Is there an immovable deadline? If few or none of the crisis telltales are present, then crisis engineering isn’t going to work.
We arrived at this list of indicators using existing research, lived experience, and experimentation. Each trait contributes in its own way to potentially creating durable positive change inside a sprawling and rigid organization.
Crises have the destabilizing power to shift incentives and invert power structures. They can radically alter priorities and disrupt existing understanding of complex systems. They tend to cause, or be caused by, a disconnect between the model of the world that exists in people’s minds and the world as it is. This is what makes sensemaking critical.
The destabilizing effects of a crisis happen no matter what. With or without active management, if the organization survives, the crisis will pass, and the organization’s incentives, priorities, and power structures will cool and solidify in a new shape. If the crisis does not pass, the organization will cease to exist in a recognizable form.
Without crisis engineering practices, a crisis is only likely to bring fear, decision-making paralysis, and further disruption to progress and change. The good news is: If you can spot a majority of these circumstances around you, there is an excellent chance you are part of an organization primed for the willingness necessary for crisis engineering.
A future better than you were capable of imagining is now possible.
Excerpted from Crisis Engineering by Marina Nitze, Matthew Weaver, and Mikey Dickerson. Copyright © 2026 by Marina Nitze, Matthew Weaver, and Mikey Dickerson. Reprinted with permission of Balance. All rights reserved.
Featured image courtesy: Andrew Teoh.
- The excerpt introduces crisis engineering: the practice of directing organizational crises toward lasting, positive change, arguing that crises are mismanaged rather than inherently destructive, and offering a five-indicator framework to help leaders recognize a genuine crisis and seize the rare window it creates for rapid transformation.
