Crisis Management and Polycrisis

What this research covers

Most management writing treats a crisis as one event that a firm steers through and then leaves behind. Firms in Lebanon, Colombia and the seven cities surveyed during the pandemic did something else: they kept operating through crises that ran for years and kept arriving on top of one another. This page gathers the research that came out of those settings, the casebook and simulation built from it, and the working papers that extend it to artificial intelligence and corporate silence. The empirical base runs from 34 interviews in Beirut to a seven-city survey of 78,000 people (Maalouf, Miklian and Hoelscher 2025; Miklian et al. 2021).

The Crisis casebook and the Force Majeure simulation

The casebook asks what happens when a firm's own playbook becomes the biggest threat to the business. In a polycrisis environment of pandemics, political instability, online outrage and fractured supply chains, conventional business strategies fail, and the cases follow leaders who chose between leading with principle and retreating from responsibility. The themes are leading authentically during crisis, engaging with fragile communities, making principled long-term decisions and turning organizational values into strategy. The book draws on two decades of the authors' research and runs to 393 pages in its digital edition.

Force Majeure is the simulation built from the same research, and its public site is conquercrisis.io. It is built for the boardroom and the classroom: organizations use it for rerunnable crisis exercises, and MBA instructors use it as a simulation mapped chapter by chapter to course material. Players run a company across roughly 200 real-world markets while the game runs the crises, with thousands of cultural and economic scenarios and more than a billion unique campaign paths.

Ethical leadership when crises overlap

Miklian and Katsos's Cambridge Element on ethical leadership in conflict and crisis sets conventional business strategy against values of community and authenticity, and argues that ethical and servant leadership attributes become essential once the usual approaches fail. It combines historical lessons, firsthand accounts and ethical perspectives on crisis. The Element appeared online in the Elements in Leadership series in May 2024 and in print in 2025 (ISBN 9781009446891, DOI 10.1017/9781009446891).

The Element's subtitle, Evidence from Leaders on How to Make More Peaceful, Sustainable, and Profitable Communities, is the title of the SSRN working paper that preceded it, Ethical Leadership in Polycrisis, which reports evidence from leaders on how to make communities more peaceful, sustainable and profitable at the same time. The working paper was posted to SSRN on 6 June 2024, and the print edition of the Element followed on 20 March 2025.

How small firms survive a polycrisis: Beirut

Beirut's small firms operate where neighboring conflicts, urban insecurity and sectarian divisions all shape daily business. Economic development policy promotes these firms as engines of resilient livelihoods, which raises the question of whether a perpetual-crisis operating mentality can deliver anything positive for the community around them. Maalouf, Miklian and Hoelscher answered it with 34 in-depth interviews with SME owners in Beirut and built a framework of SME strategies for perpetual crisis. The strategies they found differ from single-crisis approaches, and the study uses them to rethink how SMEs act as peace and development actors in urban crises (Business Horizons, 2025, DOI 10.1016/j.bushor.2025.03.002).

The Beirut study builds on the authors' conceptual review of how small businesses experience shocks. That review treats the business, the shock and the response as linked within a given context, sets out how small firms differ from large ones in experiencing shock and crisis, and reads the Covid-19 pandemic as a novel exogenous shock that reshaped every other crisis type. The review appeared in the International Small Business Journal, volume 40, issue 2, pages 178 to 204, under a CC BY licence, and the full text is free on this site (Miklian and Hoelscher 2022).

The new crisis playbook, community partnerships and the pandemic

Three Harvard Business Review pieces from 17 November 2021 carry the practitioner version of this research. The playbook article opens from the observation that each of the three trends alone makes the occasional crisis worse, a more destructive hurricane or a wider financial meltdown, and that together they magnify challenges; it answers with three strategies, elevating community relationships to true partnerships, looking beyond government authorities for guidance, and making principled, consistent political choices. The community partnerships article follows the Federación Nacional de Cafeteros de Colombia, where in 2008 coffee prices were crashing and fighting between the government and insurgents reignited in coffee regions; instead of arming headquarters or withdrawing, CEO Luis Genaro Muñoz began a ten-year plan of community engagement and peacebuilding training; firms that fully embed in their communities gain a legitimacy that improves their security and profitability.

The pandemic article draws on a 2021 survey of 78,000 people in Bogota and Medellin, Beirut, Cape Town, Caracas, San Pedro Sula and San Salvador. The largest challenges firms faced under crisis were sociopolitical: complex, systemic, hard to quantify, and most frightening to managers in cities where extortion and business violence are pervasive. Firms did better when they were embedded in their communities and recognized that they shape the systems around them as much as those systems shape them (Working Through Violence Research Team 2021). The team byline on that article names Benedicte Bull, Jason Miklian, Sarah Cechvala, Catalina Garcia, Brian Ganson, Kristian Hoelscher, Øystein H. Rolandsen, Angelika Rettberg, Jay Joseph, John Katsos and Ben Miller.

AI risk tools under crisis and political instability

A Problem of the Present examines what AI tools can and cannot deliver for business under instability. AI synthesizes conventional wisdom about the recent past and extrapolates probable futures, and it struggles with three demands that instability places on decision-makers: real-time situational awareness, tacit operational knowledge, and relational trust with affected communities. Drawing on stakeholder theory and the experience of firms that lived through such shocks, the paper shows how algorithmic mediation distorts stakeholder identification, salience and engagement, and argues that local knowledge networks are an insurance policy whose cost is a fraction of the losses absorbed when the algorithms fail. Its reference case is Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine: ESG platforms had rated Russian-market exposure as moderate and predictive models had assigned low probability to a full-scale invasion, and afterwards BP wrote down $25 billion in Rosneft assets and Shell took a $4 billion impairment on its Russian operations.

Corporate silence under polarization

The Quiet and the Compliant uses a synthetic survey of 400 corporate professionals working on social impact in fragile and conflict-affected settings to test seven hypotheses about how regulation, polarization, sector and organizational structure shape corporate social engagement. European professionals report higher strategic integration of social impact on every measured dimension; US professionals overwhelmingly report that polarization hinders social initiatives, yet that perception does not predict unreported social activity, which complicates the quiet CSR narrative. Extractive-industry professionals report both the highest operational preparedness and the highest awareness of complicity, a pattern the paper names presence-dependent reflexivity (ScienceOpen Preprints, DOI 10.14293/PR2199.003230.v2; arXiv 2604.06223).

Has Your Company Gone Quiet, or Just Given Up?, by Miklian, Katsos, Harry J. Van Buren III, Angelika Rettberg and Sarah Cechvala, was posted to SSRN on 28 August 2026 as abstract 7347858 (DOI 10.2139/ssrn.7347858). The abstract, keywords and citation record are on its page on this site.

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