Coronavirus: Leadership and Recovery: The Insights You Need from Harvard Business Review

 

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WE NEED IMAGINATION NOW MORE THAN EVER

by Martin Reeves and Jack Fuller

The idea of “crisis management” requires no explanation right now. Something unexpected and significant happens, and our first instincts are to defend against—and later to understand and manage—the disturbance to the status quo. The crisis is an unpredictable enemy to be tamed for the purpose of restoring normality.

But we may not be able to return to our familiar precrisis reality. Pandemics, wars, and other social crises often create new attitudes, needs, and behaviors, which need to be managed. We believe that imagination—the capacity to create, evolve, and exploit mental models of things or situations that don’t yet exist—is the crucial factor in seizing and ...