Of Note: Crisis as Lever

Crisis Engineering: Time-Tested Tools for Turning Chaos into Clarity by Marina Nitze, Matthew Weaver & Mickey Dickerson
Balance, April 2026

Crisis Engineering: Time-Tested Tools for Turning Chaos into Clarity provides insight into how humans react to crisis-level events and offers encouragement to navigate crises through shared sensemaking, clear communication, and novel action. The authors draw on personal experience using case studies of large-scale events, such as the Three Mile Island nuclear disaster and the healthcare.gov launch, creating a crisis toolkit that helps organizations mitigate crisis conditions and, perhaps most importantly, identify and sustain meaningful change. This deeply practical book serves not only as a scalable guide for crisis management, but also as a roadmap to leverage difficult circumstances to break old institutional patterns and create new ones. For example, in “Map the System” and “Find Your People,” the authors posit that sensemaking is inherently social and that a crisis allows you to “cocreate a plausible shared reality of how information actually flows across the organization.” The realities surfaced often create cognitive dissonance that pushes people to reimagine what is possible, establish better measurements of progress, and engage in rapid, iterative action plans that would have previously seemed out of reach. Additional sections focus on crisis communications, concluding crisis operations, and learning how to “Plan for a Future Crisis.” Crisis Engineering provides school leaders with an opportunity to rethink emergency operations and response teams, as well as insight into organizational sensemaking that can be leveraged across diverse circumstances to move an organization forward.