The Prepared Leader

When the world seems to tilt overnight—when markets collapse, a pandemic strikes, or your team faces chaos—how do you respond? Do you freeze, react, or lead? In The Prepared Leader, Erika H. James and Lynn Perry Wooten argue that crises are not aberrations of leadership—they're its truest test. The question isn't whether a crisis will happen again, but when. Their mission is clear: to help you build the mindset, systems, and capabilities to lead effectively before, during, and after the next disruption.

The authors—both pioneering university presidents and crisis scholars—speak from lived experience. Just as they assumed major leadership positions in early 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic forced them to lead schools, faculty, and students remotely through unprecedented upheaval. They blend these firsthand lessons with three decades of research into how organizations and leaders respond to volatility. What emerges is a clarion call for what they term Prepared Leadership: an approach that integrates foresight, emotional intelligence, and structured learning to thrive through inevitable crises.

From Panic and Neglect to Preparation

Human psychology, they reveal, makes us particularly bad at anticipating disasters. As the World Bank’s Jim Yong Kim once said, societies follow a “cycle of panic and neglect”—we panic during crises, then swiftly forget the lessons once normalcy returns. COVID-19 exposed these tendencies on a global scale. Despite decades of warnings from scientists about pandemics, global systems failed to prepare. James and Wooten frame this not as a failure of intelligence but of leadership.

Breaking that cycle requires turning preparation into a core organizational value. The authors propose expanding the traditional triple bottom line—people, planet, profit—into a quadruple bottom line that adds a fourth P: Prepared Leadership. Being prepared isn’t pessimism; it’s an act of optimism grounded in realism. By embedding preparedness into your culture, you enable your teams not only to survive disruption but to innovate through it.

The Framework of Prepared Leadership

The book unfolds through a step-by-step framework organized around five phases of crisis management—early warning, preparation, containment, recovery, and learning—and nine core leadership skills—sense-making, perspective-taking, influence, agility, creativity, communication, risk-taking, resilience, and learning. Throughout, the authors illuminate these principles through vivid stories: NBA commissioner Adam Silver’s creation of the “bubble” that saved the 2020 season, British health leader Mark Turner’s reorganization of London’s hospitals, and Burger King CEO José Cil’s bold rethinking of fast-food during lockdown.

Each story shows that the difference between leaders who thrive under pressure and those who crumble lies not in charisma or instinct, but in preparation. Silver’s controversial decision to suspend the NBA season—a move that cost millions but averted a larger catastrophe—illustrates how preparedness allows rapid, ethical decision-making amid uncertainty. Similarly, Turner’s diversification of NHS crisis teams into collaborative mega-communities of doctors, strategists, and nurses demonstrates the importance of diverse expertise and trust in emergencies.

Why This Matters Now

Our era is defined by compounding crises—pandemics, climate change, racial injustice, technological disruption. As the authors argue, these shocks will only intensify in an interconnected world where “what starts in one corner of the planet can spread in days.” Most leaders remain unprepared because they see crises as rare anomalies instead of recurring tests of resilience. Prepared Leadership flips this outlook: anticipate the inevitable, rehearse the unthinkable, and use every challenge as a springboard for collective growth.

In this philosophy, preparation becomes an ethical responsibility. Every decision you make today determines your organization’s capacity to endure tomorrow’s crises. This means building diverse teams, flattening hierarchies, and fostering open communication so that information flows freely when it’s needed most. It also means learning—systematically—from every setback. The best leaders treat each crisis as a classroom. They turn pain into data, data into insight, and insight into sustained transformation.

The Promise of Hope in Turbulent Times

Beneath its research and frameworks, The Prepared Leader is an optimistic book. James and Wooten insist that crises can be sources of creativity and community rather than despair. They highlight how adversity—when met with empathy and readiness—reveals hidden strengths: a frontline nurse’s ingenuity, an educator’s adaptability, a CEO’s courage to pause operations for safety’s sake. In their view, crises are the crucibles where real leadership is formed.

Ultimately, the authors urge you to stop asking how to predict the next crisis and start preparing for it now. Through case studies, reflective questions, and actionable guidance, The Prepared Leader teaches how to turn turbulence into transformation. As they write, “Prepared Leadership will be what determines your ability to deliver in terms of people, planet, and profit when the unthinkable happens.” The crisis is coming—it always is—but so are the leaders ready to meet it.

Why do humans, despite constant warnings, fail to prepare for disasters? The authors call it the cycle of panic and neglect: when crises strike, we scramble to act, but as soon as the danger fades, our attention wanes. This pattern has haunted every major catastrophe, from pandemics to financial crashes. By diagnosing this cycle, Erika James and Lynn Perry Wooten invite you to build counter-habits that turn vigilance into a leadership virtue.

Human Bias and Organizational Blindness

We are wired to underestimate threats. Cognitive biases—like probability neglect (“It won’t happen to me”), hyperbolic discounting (favoring present comfort over future safety), and the anchoring effect (clinging to first impressions)—make us shortsighted. During COVID-19’s early days, many Western leaders assumed the virus was a distant problem in Asia. By the time the World Health Organization declared a pandemic, the damage was underway. These biases also infect corporations: organizations cling to familiar metrics and ignore weak signals of crises brewing beneath the surface.

Prepared Leaders, by contrast, recognize human limitations and design structural counter-biases. That means embedding early-warning systems, diversified communication channels, and objective check-ins that challenge conventional wisdom. (Daniel Kahneman, in Thinking, Fast and Slow, similarly urges leaders to create “noise audits” to expose flawed intuition.)

Leadership in the Loop

The cure to panic-neglect isn’t paranoia—it’s preparation. James and Wooten place the responsibility squarely on leaders to break the cycle by institutionalizing readiness. When you anticipate that crises are routine, you treat them like recurring projects rather than anomalies. This attitude reframes preparedness not as a cost but as continuous risk management. It can include simulations, diverse scenario planning, or recurring “what-if” meetings to evaluate vulnerabilities.

“Crises are not one-off events. They happen time and again. Just as one crisis starts to resolve, another is already taking shape.” —James and Wooten

The NBA commissioner Adam Silver demonstrated this principle when he suspended the basketball season in March 2020. Drawing on expert advice and data, he chose human health over revenue—turning what could have been chaos into an exemplar of foresight. His “bubble” became both a health success and a business recovery tool. Silver’s story proves how Prepared Leaders can translate foresight into decisive action before panic sets in.

Preparation as the Fourth Bottom Line

The authors argue that businesses must add preparedness to the traditional metrics of success. Beyond people, planet, and profit lies the fourth bottom line: Prepared Leadership. Without it, the other three collapse during turmoil. This mindset demands investments in capability-building, psychological safety, and learning loops that capture insights after each crisis. It also challenges ego-driven leadership by replacing reaction with reflection.

By institutionalizing preparedness, you transform crisis management from episodic firefighting into a continuous ethic of responsibility. The next time the alarms sound, your organization will respond not in panic, but in purpose.

Crises may appear sudden, but they always unfold in stages. Understanding these stages allows you to manage them systematically rather than emotionally. James and Wooten outline five phases of crisis management: signal detection, preparation, damage containment, recovery, and learning. Each phase has its own mindset and skillset, but together they form a cycle—the “continuum of preparedness.”

1. Early Warning and Signal Detection

This phase requires vigilance. Think of migratory swifts that fly high into the atmosphere to sense weather changes; leaders must similarly “go higher” to read their environments. Detecting weak signals—declining morale, system glitches, customer complaints—can expose vulnerabilities before they erupt. As Volkswagen’s 2015 emissions scandal proved, ignoring early warnings (“Dieselgate”) converts manageable issues into reputational catastrophes.

2. Preparation and Prevention

Once you identify risks, act decisively. Preventive measures—crisis plans, team training, and simulation drills—are the bedrock of preparedness. New Zealand’s Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern exemplified this by screening travelers early in 2020, drastically slowing viral spread. Likewise, NBA commissioner Silver’s preemptive suspension of play safeguarded lives and reputation. Prepared Leaders recognize that the safest crises are the ones you never fully face.

3. Damage Containment

If prevention fails, the goal becomes to contain harm. This demands transparent communication and moral courage. Tim Martin of UK pub chain Wetherspoons learned this the hard way after urging employees to find new jobs mid-pandemic—his reputation plummeted. Mercury Systems’ Mark Aslett did the opposite: he used open video calls and employee relief funds to preserve trust. Containment isn’t just operational; it’s human.

4. Recovery

Recovery is when resilience is translated into results. Leaders must combine transparency with creativity. Nextdoor, a social network accused of enabling racial profiling, restructured its platform, delivered staff training, and publicly reported progress—cutting problematic incidents by 75%. Recovery isn’t only about bouncing back; it’s about bouncing forward stronger and more equitable than before.

5. Learning and Reflection

The final phase is often neglected but most vital. Reflection transforms crisis into curriculum. Post-crisis reviews, documentation, and cultural introspection convert mistakes into institutional wisdom. Without learning, organizations relapse into blindness. Prepared Leaders ensure every wound leaves a scar that teaches. As the authors put it, “Investing time in a post-crisis review can lead to a future better than the pre-crisis status quo.”

In crisis, your usual leadership toolkit may no longer work. James and Wooten identify nine essential competencies that elevate normal leadership into Prepared Leadership. These nine skills align with the five crisis phases and emphasize adaptability, empathy, and learning across every step of the journey.

1. Sense-Making and Perspective-Taking

First, you must make sense of the chaos—distinguishing noise from signal. This means asking targeted questions and synthesizing data from many sources. Then comes perspective-taking: integrating others’ viewpoints to broaden understanding. Adam Silver sought not only team data but also insights from health experts and former surgeon generals. His decision to prioritize safety was informed, not impulsive.

2. Influence and Organizational Agility

Influence rests on trust. It’s the ability to align people behind urgent, sometimes uncomfortable actions. Silver influenced thousands of players, owners, and fans because he communicated transparently. Agility complements influence: teams must pivot without friction. Do your systems allow quick decisions without bureaucracy? Prepared Leaders grant authority where it matters most—closest to the problem.

3. Creativity and Communication

Crisis demands creativity under pressure. The NBA invented a safe “bubble”; NHS London built elective surgical hubs in record time. These ideas emerged because leaders dared to rethink norms. Communication, meanwhile, is the connective tissue. Mercury Systems CEO Mark Aslett used daily video dialogues to replace rumor with transparency, anchoring morale. He “stayed on calls until every question was answered.”

4. Risk-Taking and Resilience

To lead under pressure, you must act despite uncertainty. Taking informed risks—rather than waiting for clarity—defines Prepared Leadership. When informed by empathy and data, risk-taking breeds innovation. Resilience sustains it. The most resilient organizations empower employees to learn, adapt, and even fail safely. Resilience is built on shared purpose and trust, not slogans.

5. Individual and Systemic Learning

Finally, learning closes the loop. It’s not just a personal reflection exercise but a systemic imperative—document, debrief, and apply changes. Learning ensures you’re ready for the next challenge. Every failure holds a blueprint for future success (Peter Senge’s learning organization concept echoes the same philosophy: treat work as continual education). By cultivating these nine skills, you future-proof your leadership and your organization.

Crises compress time and magnify consequences. In panic, even capable leaders default to instinct or ego. James and Wooten teach that how you frame a crisis determines how you decide. In chaos, framing is everything: do you see threat or opportunity? Winners blend both perspectives—protecting stability while seizing transformation.

Threats versus Opportunities

When Burger King CEO José Cil envisioned a pandemic-resistant “Restaurant of Tomorrow,” he chose to reframe collapse as a design challenge. While most restaurant executives downsized, Cil cut dining space by 60% and doubled down on app-based pickup. His bold bet epitomized the opportunistic mindset. Seeing crisis as an opening demands courage but creates enduring advantage.

Four Decision Frames

The authors propose four frames for crisis cognition: the Design frame (treat the organization as a system to reconfigure), the Political frame (negotiate power and trust), the Human Resource frame (harness people’s capabilities and emotions), and the Cultural frame (capitalize on shared purpose and values). Great decision-makers integrate all four, shifting as context demands. For example, Jacinda Ardern’s empathetic COVID response fused cultural solidarity with systemic agility—a textbook multi-frame approach.

Self-Awareness as Strategy

Leadership scholar Robert Quinn’s four self-diagnostic questions—Am I results-centered? Internally directed? Focused on others? Externally open?—encourage leaders to confront blind spots in their decision habits. By answering them before crises, you train your cognitive flexibility. (Psychologists call this metacognition: reflection that enhances adaptation.)

Defeating Cognitive Biases

Biases like confirmation and sunk-cost distort judgment most when pressure rises. The antidote is diversity. By inviting dissent, expertise, and multiple viewpoints, you create checks that widen perception and restore rationality. As José Cil admitted in his public letter to employees, “A wide range of voices and perspectives make us stronger.” That simple truth captures the cornerstone of Prepared decision-making: inclusion is the new intelligence.

No one leads through a crisis alone. The core of Prepared Leadership lies in cultivating a diverse, empowered team that can think, act, and adapt faster than any individual. James and Wooten spotlight Mark Turner of the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) London, who proved that dynamic teamwork can revitalize even bureaucracy-bound institutions.

From Hierarchy to Collaboration

Before COVID-19, NHS London operated in silos. Turner dismantled hierarchy by inviting frontline physicians into strategic decision-making. Their medical expertise became the compass for action. The result? “Elective hubs” that centralized non-COVID surgeries and cleared patient backlogs—restoring 80% capacity within months. By letting clinicians lead, Turner proved the power of inclusive agility over rigid command.

Four Steps to Building a Crisis Team

• Compose for diversity: Seek varied expertise and perspectives beyond your usual circle.
• Establish shared purpose: Define goals clearly so all members commit to a unified outcome.
• Create a culture of openness: Encourage experimentation, empathy, and tolerance for failure.
• Empower autonomy: Remove red tape and trust your team to act on real-time information.

Turner calls this process “unlocking creativity.” It transforms managers from controllers into conductors of expertise. The authors compare it to jazz: every musician takes turns leading while listening and improvising together. Similarly, the Prepared Leader ensures influence flows freely up, down, and sideways—strengthening adaptability and morale.

Prepared Leadership redefines authority. As the authors stress, leadership doesn’t mean having all the answers; it means creating the conditions where answers emerge. When you defer to expertise, you distribute intelligence—and that collective intelligence becomes your ultimate resilience strategy.

Taking charge of a new team during crisis—what the authors call “walking in mid-movie”—may be leadership’s toughest challenge. You inherit stress, fear, and fragmented relationships. The key? Accelerating trust before results. Wonya Lucas, appointed CEO of Hallmark’s Crown Media in July 2020, entered such a storm. Her example illustrates how vulnerability and communication build rapid alignment.

Building Swift Trust

Trust usually takes time, but crises compress it. Organizational scholar Deb Meyerson calls this “swift trust”—a temporary but strong consensus around purpose. Lucas achieved it by scheduling 30+ personal Zoom calls with staff, asking about their hopes instead of their job titles. This simple reframing humanized her leadership and reassured teams that their voices mattered. Within weeks, morale lifted.

The Three C’s of Trust

James’s “Trust Assessment Wheel” maps trust across three dimensions: Communication (honesty and transparency), Contract (following through on promises), and Competence (capability to deliver). Lucas modeled all three by immediately addressing redundant processes and acting on feedback—turning input into visible change. Each follow-through reinforced credibility.

Leveraging Vulnerability and Learning

In crises, showing vulnerability fosters relatability. Lucas began town halls by admitting she didn’t have all the answers but was committed to learning together. This candor paradoxically strengthened authority—it signaled authenticity and courage. Similarly, James and Wooten share how starting at Wharton and Simmons amid the pandemic forced them to rely on structured communication, cross-silo collaboration, and continual learning to build credibility fast.

Prepared Leaders understand that trust is a process, not a personality trait. When you communicate openly, keep your word, and empower your team to perform, you turn crisis from a threat into an initiation of shared purpose.

We live in an era where crises no longer stay local. Whether it’s a virus, a tweet, or a protest, disruptions now span borders and stakeholder ecosystems. James and Wooten highlight 2020 as a cascade of interlinked shocks—from COVID to racial injustice to climate emergencies—and argue that only leaders with a global mindset can navigate such complexity.

The Global Mindset Defined

A global mindset extends beyond cross-cultural skill; it’s the capacity to perceive multiple realities at once. You’re not just managing a brand—you’re managing meanings across cultural, generational, and ethical boundaries. HSBC’s Peter Wong learned this painfully when his endorsement of China’s new Hong Kong law alienated half the bank’s Western stakeholders. His “local alignment” ignited global backlash.

Contrast that with leaders who embodied empathy and awareness. During the global reckoning after George Floyd’s murder, many corporations acknowledged social responsibility. Greg Glassman of CrossFit, however, responded with a flippant “Floyd-19” tweet. The digital world amplified that misstep instantly, destroying his brand. The difference wasn’t resources—it was cultural intelligence.

Culture, Gender, and Generational Frames

Prepared Leaders analyze how crises intersect with identity. Using Geert Hofstede’s framework, the authors note how collectivist societies like Japan enforced pandemic measures smoothly, while individualist cultures resisted mandates. Gender also shaped success: research during COVID-19 found that countries run by women—like New Zealand and Germany—suffered lower death rates, largely due to more empathetic communication. Generational differences matter too: Gen Z leaders are digital natives who insist on transparency and equity, redefining activism inside organizations.

Mega Communities of Response

In globalized crises, networks become the new units of survival. The authors introduce “mega communities”—coalitions that unite business, government, and civic actors for shared problem-solving. The global consortium that produced COVID vaccines in under a year epitomizes this principle. Prepared Leaders cultivate such ecosystems, bridging boundaries through trust, technology, and shared values. In a globalized world, your resilience is no longer local—it’s networked.

Technology can both save and sink organizations in crisis. During COVID-19, digital platforms became lifelines for communication, logistics, and innovation. Yet, as the authors emphasize, “technology is only as good as the leader who uses it.” Properly leveraged, it amplifies Prepared Leadership; misused, it magnifies folly.

Tech as Enabler

Mark Turner used Microsoft Teams to run NHS “hackathons” that united staff to solve bottlenecks in care. Video meetings replaced bureaucracy with agility. Likewise, universities used remote learning tools to engage global audiences, accelerating education’s digital transformation. Technology allowed organizations to maintain connection and continuity—a key factor in psychological resilience.

Tech as Foe

Contrast this with CrossFit’s implosion. Greg Glassman’s three-word tweet and leaked Zoom comments destroyed a billion-dollar brand in days. Social media amplified offense into outrage. His story warns that digital tools mirror character: they reward empathy and expose arrogance. (In Digital Minimalism, Cal Newport argues that responsible leaders must use technology deliberately, not reactively.)

Digital Transformation as People Transformation

Prepared Leaders view digitalization as a cultural shift, not just an IT project. They pair tools with training, inclusion, and ethical intent. As entrepreneur Lubomila Jordanova notes, data-driven platforms like her startup Plan A help companies quantify climate risk—but only if leaders have the courage to act on insights. The future, says Mauro Guillén of Cambridge, belongs to those who combine AI foresight with human values: “Prepared Leaders use technology to predict, not just react.”

Technology, then, is both an amplifier and a test. It reveals whether your leadership culture promotes learning, empathy, and reflection—or ego, opacity, and neglect. The tool itself is neutral; leadership makes it moral.

Prepared Leadership begins and ends with one verb: to learn. Learning ensures every crisis becomes a rehearsal for the next. James and Wooten insist that the only true failure is failing to translate experience into insight. When leaders stop learning, they fall back into the cycle of panic and neglect.

Why Leaders Fail to Learn

Some leaders never look inward. Greg Glassman ignored past scandals at CrossFit, cultivating a toxic culture that suppressed dissent. Without psychological safety, employees stop surfacing critical feedback, stunting organizational learning. Others succumb to arrogance or denial, seeing crises as bad luck rather than flawed practice. In contrast, NBA’s Adam Silver studied the NFL’s mishandling of domestic violence cases to preempt similar incidents—proving that learning from others’ missteps can avert your own.

Learning Before, During, and After

• Before: Build a culture of reflection; benchmark against others; run scenario analyses.
• During: Capture insights in real time; encourage feedback; recognize errors early.
• After: Conduct a formal post-crisis review; document lessons; integrate new procedures.

These steps ensure continuous growth. As Emory professor Kristy Towry’s research shows, people learn more by observing others’ failures (“vicarious learning”) than by copying their successes. Prepared Leaders deliberately study both triumphs and mistakes—from rivals, industries, and history—to broaden their own response repertoire.

From Survival to Renewal

Learning turns crisis response into crisis readiness. It reframes disaster as data and recovery as reinvention. As the authors write, “Crises can be leveraged to drive organizational change and unlock future innovation.” To do that, you must treat reflection as your final deliverable—an investment in resilience. When learning becomes habitual, you no longer fear crises; you prepare for them with clarity and confidence.

Prepared Leadership, therefore, is not a one-time strategy but a lifelong practice. It is the discipline of understanding that while we cannot predict the storm, we can always learn to navigate the next one better.