Resilient Leadership: Learning from crisis – an experiment in reflective learning during the COVID-19 pandemic

This report focuses on the role of leadership for resilience – leadership that promotes and enables complex systems (in this case corporations and large cities) to function and thrive in the face of a major crisis.

Resilience is the ability to withstand, adapt to changing conditions, and recover positively from shocks and stresses. This applies to physical infrastructure assets, and to the wider system that these assets are part of including the natural environment, the organizations that own and operate these systems, and the humans who make decisions across the value chains for these systems.

The Resilient Leadership project has been an experiment from the outset, conceptualized, and pulled together in a somewhat incredible fourteen days as the coronavirus pandemic was gathering momentum in late March. The ideas we most wanted to test were:

If senior leaders were asked to set aside half an hour every week for 16 weeks to have a reflective conversation about what they were facing, during possibly the most challenging professional period of their lives, would they agree to this? And would they find it valuable enough to stick with it?
What if leaders were mixed from global corporations with leaders from major cities? Would they find each other’s experiences and insights relevant?
Would the weekly conversations – intimate and unstructured as they were to be – yield any worthwhile lessons learned that outsiders might find helpful and actionable?

That the answer to each has been a resounding “Yes” is a tribute to the extraordinary openness of our twelve participants – each of them a willing and determined companion in the quest to find what good leadership means in a crisis. It is also a tribute to our project team’s corresponding attentiveness and dedication through an intense few months.