Why Leaders Should Expect the Next Disaster — and Prepare Now

When U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres in October 2025 urged all countries to implement a disaster warning system to stave off the worst effects of extreme weather, he suggested a path both intuitive and rare: planning ahead for crisis.

According to new work by a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Virginia Darden School of Business, this framing — treating crises as expected events that require a stakeholder leadership approach to reduce their negative impacts — holds lessons for dealing with a range of future calamities.

In early 2020, Prem Menghwar had plans to embed with the Indus Hospital in Pakistan as part of his Ph.D. work to understand how a nonprofit hospital had achieved exponential growth while maintaining quality and providing free care to patients. Why did employees seem to love working in this specific health care organization versus private hospitals, which often offered significant workplace perks?

As he began his research, the COVID-19 virus began to upend work and life. What began as an investigation into organizational growth and excellence soon morphed into a novel study on anticipating and leading through crisis.

“I already had approval to do my research with them and then received an offer from the research department head to explore how they were planning to manage the COVID-19 crisis,” said Menghwar. “One of the founders of the hospital was interested in exploring how the hospital would deal with this devastating crisis — or what might cause it to collapse.”

At the time, COVID-19 was spreading rapidly in Europe, where Menghwar was based, but had not yet been diagnosed in Pakistan. The window offered a unique opportunity to conduct research on crisis management not after the fact, but in anticipation of an event that could prove devastating.

The resulting paper, “Rethinking Crisis as Expected: Stakeholder Leadership in Navigating Ethical Dilemmas and Avoiding Polycrises,” was published in the Journal of Business Ethics in June 2025. The paper offers guidance for individuals and organizations on anticipating crises, leading with purpose, and developing a leadership style that manages to be both decentralized and nimble.

How to Lead When You Know Crisis Is Coming

Few saw the COVID-19 pandemic coming, and yet because of the uneven initial geographic spread of the virus, some areas were given more notice than others. Working in the hospital in Pakistan, Menghwar was interviewing healthcare leaders and employees who were watching other hospitals functionally collapse under the weight of the virus. He assumed that his study hospital would likely collapse under the weight of too many needs and too few resources.

Instead, the quantitative and qualitative data showed a hospital that continued to function even as the wave came ashore in Pakistan. In addition to the hard work and bravery of countless frontline health care workers, Menghwar said a key was the choices made by leaders, beginning with the decision to treat the crisis as expected, as opposed to something that might happen and could be reacted to in real-time.

“That was the first lesson, that crises are not unexpected events,” said Menghwar, who began his data collection in the hospital in April 2020 and continued until August 2021. “We may not know the timing, but we know they will happen.”

This framing not only put many practical steps into place at the hospital — stockpiling oxygen and masks, for instance — but also gave leaders time to explore the often overlooked ethical dimensions of crises. Leadership built on reaction to crises treated as unexpected is more likely to ignore ethical considerations, Menghwar said, which can exacerbate crisis moments and lead to polycrises, defined as overlapping and interconnected crises.

Viewing Crisis Through a Purpose-Driven Lens

In the midst of crises, leaders may be able to better manage ethical dilemmas by revisiting the organization’s purpose. In the case of Indus, the nonprofit hospital was established to provide quality health care to underprivileged individuals at zero cost. As COVID-19 began to impact health care systems in 2020, many private hospitals closed their doors to new patients. Indus leaders instead vowed that the hospital would be guided by its mission to serve, and would keep its doors open while doing everything in its power to protect its employees. While the move may seem obviously correct in hindsight, the spring of 2020 was a period of great fear and lack of information as the virus spread.

The decision by leadership to lean into the hospital’s purpose influenced the frontline workers, too. As one employee told Menghwar: “Yes, starting I was very fearful…but [we remembered] our oath and then we realized that purpose is key and we cannot stay away from the patients, so I worked in [the] COVID-19 ward.”

In times of crisis, managers can orient themselves and their organizations and ultimately make better decisions by reflecting on the question, “Why does this organization exist?” Menghwar says.

Conversely, leaders in organizations with poorly defined or overly narrow purposes are likelier to make self-serving, destructive choices.

From Centralized to Stakeholder Leadership

With the decision made to continue operating in the spirit of its founding purpose, hospital leadership empowered others to lead, embracing what Menghwar calls “stakeholder leadership” — characterized by enfranchising new leaders, distributing operational work, and facilitating collaboration. Instead of the CEO and COO making all key decisions, power and control were distributed to medical experts throughout the hospital. C-suite leaders took on roles of facilitators and, in some instances, joined their colleagues on the front lines of patient interaction.

An ideal, reciprocal relationship between leaders was developed, Menghwar found, with senior leaders performing operational work and giving power to new leaders, who in turn influenced senior leadership. Moreover, successfully dispersing leadership roles appeared to speed up key decision-making, countering assumptions that a centralized leader was needed to make decisions in times of crisis. In the new, dispersed model, these emerging leaders were able to take responsibility in ways that led to quicker decision making.

The devotion to the staff was seen in other ways. No employee at the hospital was furloughed or saw their salary reduced, those who worked in COVID-19 wards were given small bonuses.

While the study was focused on a single health care system and metrics of success were limited to health care access for patients and the well-being of health care workers, Menghwar says it may have applicability in a range of contexts. Are governments and organizations treating global crises related to floods, fires, hurricanes and human displacement as expected or unexpected, as the action plan likely changes depending on the framing? And, failure to treat devastating weather events as expected, for instance, may pave the way for related polycrises.

“The study suggests that it is crucial to take future crises into consideration,” said Menghwar. “This point seems obvious, but there are many crises which are largely ignored. Crises related to global warming, such as floods and tsunamis, are expected crises. Disease outbreaks and financial crises are also expected crises, however, they are largely ignored until they cause devastation — and then deemed unexpected.”

Prem Menghwar is co-author of “Rethinking Crisis as Expected: Stakeholder Leadership in Navigating Ethical Dilemmas and Avoiding Polycrises,” with Fabian Homberg, Zafar Zaidi and Ashar Alam, published in the Journal of Business Ethics (2025).