CATEGORISING EXTREME CRISIS SITUATIONS
Generally, traditional management, leadership, and engineering education programmes address “normal” business situations, not diving deep enough into the development of management skills aimed at leading and deciding under extreme crisis. Some examples, however, as the cases posed by some explosions at industrial plants and similar infrastructures do happen, even if they are scarce. Such severe events could be categorised by being rare, but of high impact and consequences. From the Piper Alpha accident in the North Sea, to the BP Deepwater Horizon accident at the Gulf of Mexico and the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear drama in Japan; these are situations where uncertainty and potential impacts affecting lives and assets are extreme, and where the finest leadership and courage are called upon.
To provide some background to further support insight for leadership under crisis, the Fukushima Daiichi drama which caused already thousands of deaths is used as illustrative background. During the crisis peak, Mr. Yoshida, the Daiichi nuclear powerplant manager, had to deal with many critical issues at once, while trying to make sense of the whole situation with scarce information
