Leadership in Prolonged Crises: Sensemaking, Strategic Transformation, and Resilience

The purpose of this study is to examine how leaders transform their understanding of and deal with extended crises, thereby going beyond the episodic crisis management paradigm. In this way, leadership will be considered a dynamic process of sensemaking, strategic transformation, and endurance. The research seeks to understand how leaders overcome the urge to see prolonged volatility as a set of solvable problems and recast crises as an unceasing state that requires adaptive sensemaking, strategic transformation, and building resilience among all concerned parties. Leadership becomes a process of cyclical engagement involving interpretation, intervention, and endurance, with the distinction between reaction and anticipation becoming increasingly irrelevant and strategic transformation not aimed at restoring an earlier status quo but establishing a provisional balance amid chaos. A qualitative multiple-case study methodology is employed. The data collection was done through semi-structured interviews that were conducted with five leaders. The results reveal a three-part process in which leaders engage in emotional regulation and relational sensemaking through trusted networks, rewrite their strategies fundamentally rather than incrementally, and endure by protecting their teams from external influences. Furthermore, leaders are normalising crises as a permanent state. This research contributes to the theory of crisis leadership by highlighting the protective and filtering effects of leaders, the importance of context, and the necessity of recurring pivoting skills. It has implications for practice by including pauses in processes, developing relational infrastructure, and formalising protective leadership positions. The research concludes by asserting that permanent crises require continuous interpretation, reorientation, and enduringness by leaders. Therefore, this challenges conventional preparedness-based theories of crisis management.