By Conan J. Higgins, Esq., KM, Ph.D.

President & General Counsel, TSI Legal Enterprises, PC | Amazon Bestselling Author of The Maverick’s Blueprint

Crisis does not send a calendar invite. It does not wait for your leadership team to finish a strategic planning cycle or for your legal counsel to review the contingency binder. It arrives on its own schedule, in its own form, and with consequences that compound by the hour. The organizations that survive and even gain ground during a crisis are not the ones with the thickest playbooks. They are the ones led by people who can think clearly when clarity is in short supply.

I have spent the better part of three decades operating in environments where the margin for error was measured in seconds, not quarters. As a Joint Terminal Attack Controller in U.S. Air Force Special Operations, I coordinated live air strikes in combat zones where a miscommunication could cost lives. As a Washington State Trooper and SWAT team leader, I managed volatile tactical situations where de-escalation and decisive action had to coexist. And as an international business attorney and crisis leadership consultant, I have carried those lessons into boardrooms, government ministries, and C-suites across 19 countries.

What I have learned is this: crisis leadership is not a subset of leadership. It is leadership distilled to its essence. Everything that matters about how you lead becomes visible when the stakes are real and the time is short.

The Myth of the Playbook

Most organizations approach crisis preparedness the same way: develop a plan, assign roles, run a tabletop exercise once a year, and file it away. There is nothing wrong with preparation. But there is something deeply wrong with the assumption that a crisis will conform to the scenario you rehearsed.

In my experience, the crises that do the most damage are the ones that fall between the seams of existing plans. They are the situations where legal risk, operational disruption, reputational exposure, and regulatory scrutiny converge simultaneously. They are the moments when your export compliance framework is tested not by an audit, but by an urgent shipment to a contested end-user in a conflict zone. They are the phone calls at 2 a.m. informing you that a key partner has been sanctioned, or that a wire fraud scheme has been running through your supply chain for months.

In those moments, the playbook is not useless. But it is insufficient. What matters is the quality of thinking at the top.

Clarity Under Compression

The first casualty of any crisis is bandwidth. Decision-makers are flooded with incomplete information, competing demands, and stakeholders who each believe their concern is the most urgent. The natural human response is to either freeze or to act impulsively. Neither works.

Effective crisis leaders develop what I call “clarity under compression.” It is the ability to rapidly sort signal from noise, identify the two or three decisions that will determine the trajectory of the next 24 to 48 hours, and act on them with conviction while acknowledging what you do not yet know.

This is not something you develop in a seminar. It is built through repeated exposure to high-consequence environments. My time as a JTAC taught me that the best decisions under fire come from a disciplined process: gather what information is available, confirm what you know versus what you assume, communicate your intent clearly, execute, and reassess. That cycle, repeated with speed and discipline, is the engine of effective crisis response whether the crisis involves kinetic operations or a collapsing international joint venture.

The Role of Cultural Intelligence

One dimension of crisis leadership that is consistently underestimated is cultural intelligence. When a crisis unfolds across borders, understanding the legal and regulatory landscape is only half the equation. The other half is understanding how your counterparts think, negotiate, and make decisions under pressure.

I have managed crises and led complex transactions across the Middle East, Africa, Europe, and Asia. In each region, the calculus is different. What constitutes urgency, how trust is established, who holds real decision-making authority versus positional authority, and how risk is perceived all vary dramatically. A crisis response strategy that works in Washington, D.C. may be counterproductive in Doha or Tbilisi.

When I served as Chief Operating Officer at Daruna Development and helped lead a $450+ million public/private partnership with the government of Qatar, the most critical skill was not financial modeling or contract drafting. It was the ability to read a room, to understand the unspoken concerns behind a formal objection, and to adapt my approach in real time without losing strategic direction. That is cultural intelligence applied at the operational level, and it is indispensable in international crisis management.

Strategic Adaptability Is Not Improvisation

There is a common misconception that adaptability means making it up as you go. The opposite is true. Strategic adaptability requires a deep reservoir of knowledge, frameworks, and experience that allows a leader to rapidly construct a new approach when the original plan fails.

Consider the difference between a jazz musician and someone randomly pressing piano keys. Both are departing from a written score. But the jazz musician draws on years of theory, practice, and performance to create something coherent and compelling in the moment. Crisis leadership works the same way. The leader who can pivot effectively is not winging it. They are drawing on a deep well of experience and applying it to novel circumstances with discipline and intent.

In my practice, I see this play out most often in export control and government contracting situations. A DSP-5 application for explosive materials to a Ukrainian end-user is not a routine compliance exercise. It sits at the intersection of ITAR regulations, geopolitical risk, congressional oversight, and commercial urgency. There is no playbook for that specific scenario. But there is a way of thinking, a framework for balancing legal obligation, business reality, and strategic risk, that produces sound decisions under pressure.

Communication as a Force Multiplier

During a crisis, communication is not a support function. It is a strategic weapon. How a leader communicates, internally and externally, during the first hours of a crisis often determines whether the organization retains credibility and cohesion or begins to fracture.

I learned this in combat, where the difference between a clear and muddled radio call could be the difference between an effective strike and a catastrophic error. The principle translates directly to the corporate environment. When a crisis hits, your team needs three things from you: an honest assessment of the situation, a clear articulation of the immediate priorities, and confidence that there is a path forward even if the full plan is not yet defined.

Too many leaders either over-communicate (flooding the team with every detail and possibility) or under-communicate (retreating into silence while they figure things out). Both erode trust. The best crisis communicators strike a balance: they share what is known, acknowledge what is uncertain, define the next step, and set expectations for when the next update will come. That rhythm creates stability in an inherently unstable situation.

Building Crisis-Ready Organizations

The ultimate goal of crisis leadership is not to be the hero who saves the day. It is to build organizations that can absorb shocks, adapt quickly, and emerge stronger. That requires investment in three areas.

First, invest in people. The most sophisticated crisis response plan is only as good as the people executing it. Leaders should identify and develop individuals throughout the organization who demonstrate sound judgment under pressure, not just technical competence. Promote people who think well in uncertainty, not just those who perform well in stability.

Second, invest in relationships. Crises are resolved through networks, not org charts. The general counsel who has a strong working relationship with the regulator, the operations lead who has trust with the overseas partner, the CEO who can pick up the phone and reach the right person in government: these relationships are crisis infrastructure, and they must be built before they are needed.

Third, invest in honest assessment. Organizations that cannot tolerate bad news in peacetime will be blindsided in crisis. Build a culture where information flows upward without distortion, where leaders ask hard questions without punishing honest answers, and where post-crisis reviews are conducted with genuine candor rather than blame.

Leading When It Counts

In my book, The Maverick’s Blueprint: Crisis Leadership for an Unstable World, I wrote that the true measure of a leader is not what they accomplish when everything is going according to plan. It is what they do when the plan disintegrates and everyone is looking to them for direction.

That conviction comes from experience. It comes from calling in close air support while under fire and from negotiating multi-hundred-million-dollar partnerships across cultural and political divides. It comes from standing in courtrooms, boardrooms, and command centers where the consequences of every decision were immediate and tangible.

Crisis leadership is not a title or a certification. It is a practice. It is refined through preparation, tested through experience, and defined by the willingness to step forward when the path is unclear and the stakes are high. For organizations operating in today’s complex, interconnected, and volatile global environment, it is not optional. It is the most essential form of leadership there is.

About the Author

Conan J. Higgins, Esq., Ph.D., is the President and General Counsel of TSI Legal Enterprises, PC, a service-disabled veteran-owned law firm specializing in international business law, export control compliance, defense contracting, and crisis leadership consulting. A decorated U.S. Air Force Special Operations veteran with two Bronze Stars for Valor, former Washington State Trooper and SWAT team leader, and Amazon bestselling author, Conan has been recognized as General Counsel of the Year (Global 100, 2023) and International Business Lawyer of the Year (Corporate INTL Global Awards, 2023). He holds leadership roles in the ABA Section of International Law and has worked across 19 countries in sectors spanning aerospace, defense, technology, and international development.