Is every crisis in business actually a crisis?

In organisational life, we’ve developed a habit: when something goes wrong - or even looks like it might - we rush to call it a crisis. The word shows up in boardrooms, inboxes, and hurried Zoom calls. And with it comes urgency, pressure, and a pull toward top-down control.

But is every business crisis truly a crisis? Or are we, in our desire for clarity and swift action, mislabelling complex challenges and in turn responding in ways that may do more harm than good?

When crisis becomes the default

The language of crisis triggers a predictable chain reaction. Authority is centralised. Decisions are rushed. Collaboration tightens into control. People wait to be told what to do rather than offering opinions and perspectives on what they see. We slip into what leadership scholar Keith Grint might describe as a “Command” response - fit for critical problems, like a building on fire, but far less suited to the nuanced complexity many organisations face today.

Grint’s framework distinguishes between three types of problems:

• Critical (urgent and clear-cut, requiring authority) - “Get out of the building, its on fire!”

• Tame (complicated but solvable with expertise) - “In case there is a fire, here is the process for exiting the building.” 

• Wicked (complex, ambiguous, and entangled with people and context) - “What might we all need now that the fire has been put out?”

  
  

The issue is: when we treat wicked problems like critical ones—labelling them crises—we often miss the opportunity for more thoughtful, inclusive, and creative leadership.

The cost of crisis thinking

When everything becomes a crisis, we default to heroic leadership—often uninvited, reactive, and rigid. 

This leads to:

• Disempowerment of teams, as decision-making moves upward.

• Reduced innovation, as fear narrows thinking.

• Burnout, as urgency becomes the norm rather than the exception.

• And perhaps most ironically, slower progress, because the problem was never a crisis in the first place - it was a challenge that required conversation and multiple perspectives.

  
  

Leading with curiosity, not control

Wicked problems don’t need a hero. They need a host - a leader who creates the space for dialogue, makes it safe to say “I don’t know yet,” and sees the solution as something to be co-created, not imposed.

Curious leadership doesn’t deny the difficulty - it honours it. But it does so by widening the circle, distributing responsibility, and modelling resilience rather than panic.

When leaders resist the urge to declare crisis, they invite their teams into something far more powerful: shared ownership. The work becomes not just solving a problem, but growing together through it - and sharing in the success of what comes next.

So, is every crisis a crisis?

Not quite. And the moment we stop treating them all as such, we start unlocking the full potential of our people - and the collective intelligence waiting just beneath the noise of urgency.