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Purpose: We aim to show how extreme fiction can be used to study possible future extreme events, allowing researchers to get "up close" to potentially dangerous settings.

Design/methodology/approach: How can research help to understand a world that has become more unpredictable and dangerous? We assess the use of fiction as research material and explore dramatized movie accounts of possible future accidents, crises and disasters through "extreme fiction" - a genre which has been underutilized. We assess the benefits and limitations of using extreme fiction as a research resource. An example of how extreme fiction can challenge assumptions and generate novel theoretical insights is presented.

Findings: Extreme fiction can help us to anticipate, understand and prepare for possible future crises. This medium can also prompt challenges to taken-for-granted assumptions and trigger fresh theoretical insights.

Research limitations/implications: The use of extreme fiction as research material is limited by concerns of credibility, evidential boundaries and selectivity. We suggest ways of responding to these challenges.

Practical implications: This approach gives researchers an additional lens through which to explore future accidents, crises and disasters. Improved understanding improves our ability to anticipate, plan and respond more effectively to such events.

Social implications: Exposure to fictional crises in movies and other media can increase resilience to actual events. Disaster movies can be seen as educational as well as entertaining.

Originality/value: Implausible, unrealistic, exaggerated and sensationalized, fictional accounts of extreme events have been overlooked by research. But to develop understanding of future possibilities and prompt fresh thinking, implausibility is a useful property of these accounts.

Markus Hällgren, Oscar Rantatalo and Ola Lindberg examine the interface between research on extreme contexts and strategy as practice research. The authors argue that combining these two bodies of literature can help management and organization researchers to develop more impactful research. They start by discussing what an extreme context is, followed by an overview of how strategizing plays out in risky, emergency, disruptive and surprising contexts. Then, the authors provide an empirical vignette from their own research as an example of strategy work in a risky setting. This example uses incident command organizing to perform strategic work during extreme situations. The case study illustrates how strategic change entails a dynamic and political process during which actors within the same practice may act with different objectives. While the authors show that excellent work has already been done at the interface of extreme contexts and strategy as practice research, they suggest future research avenues that would allow reinforcing the bridges between these two areas of research.

How can we understand the demands on leaders who will have to deal with extreme events that have not occurred before? This is becoming increasingly important as organizations need support to prepare for unknown, unprecedented, and unimaginable events. In a workshop with a police incident command team, we explore how extreme fiction—radically imaginative narratives of accidents, crises, and disasters—can help. To do this, we conducted a workshop with the team, responding to a scene from the apocalyptic television series The Walking Dead. We make two contributions. First, we show how extreme fiction can help to reimagine assumptions about crisis leadership. Specifically, we find that crisis leadership can benefit from weaknesses as it increases the response approach. Second, we find that extreme fiction creates engagement and reduces the reliance on simple, formulaic solutions that may be of little use in the future. This helps practitioners prepare and build resilience for handling surprising, unimaginable extreme events.

This paper examines learning processes in crisis management organizations, focusing on Incident management and command in the military, police, and county administrative board in Sweden. Using a participation lens, we explore human interactions during high-pressure crises. Our research question is formulated as follows: How does the practice of training for crisis shape practitioners' habits regarding crisis management in organizations? To examine this, we conducted 19 days of fieldwork, including observations and 18 semi-structured interviews, enabled a comparative analysis of organising in incident management situations. We found that training groups influence organizational routines, suggesting that learning routines involve habit formation through repeated actions. This challenges traditional incident command training assumptions and highlights the need for training programs that prioritize relevance over realism.

This article investigates how participants in simulations of extreme events handle inadequacy, contributing to the discussion on workplace learning in high-pressure and unpredictable scenarios. The study is based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted across five simulations in three organizations (military, police, and county administrative board), involving 288 h of observations, ethnographic interviews, and 18 semi-structured interviews. The analysis focused on identifying episodes where participants encountered inadequacy, exploring how they recognized, attributed, and addressed it. Our findings reveal that inadequacy disrupts routine practices but also fosters opportunities for learning and innovation. Key conditions for effectively handling inadequacy include the voicing of inadequacy, which requires psychologically safe environments, and proactive responses such as improvisation or acceptance under urgency. Additionally, simulations, while controlled and artificial, effectively expose inadequacies, revealing gaps in preparedness that can inform future crisis responses. This article contributes to professional learning by highlighting inadequacy as a critical factor in both individual and collective learning, offering insights into how simulations can be designed to enhance preparedness for unpredictable, high-stakes events.

This article explores how guides negotiate uncertainty in a risky mountain environment based on three years of participant ethnography with Norwegian ski guides. This study makes two primary contributions. First, we introduce the literature on organizational routine dynamics to adventure tourism research; this helps to explain how guides perform and adapt routines to socio-ecological uncertainty. Second, our socio-ecologically informed approach highlights how social interactions impact the ‘more-than-human’ post-materialist discourse in adventure tourism research. These two contributions, in combination, suggest that negotiating uncertainty is dependent on the evolving nature of socio-ecological entanglements.

This special issue advances our understanding of organizing and strategizing in extreme contexts by focusing on temporality, emotions, and embodiment. Extreme contexts – marked by unpredictability, high stakes, and urgency – challenge organizational capacities and demand innovative responses. Drawing on the foundation of extreme context research, this introduction explores three perspectives: extreme as an event, a situational context, and a socially constructed practice. Together, these perspectives illuminate how organizations navigate, adapt to, and construct extremeness through temporal, emotional, and embodied processes. The contributions span diverse empirical settings and theoretical frameworks. By examining the contributions in the light of these dimensions, this introduction highlights the evolving and contested nature of extreme context research. The introduction concludes with a call for future studies to deepen engagement with materiality, relational dynamics, and methodological innovations, reinforcing the relevance of this field to broader management and organization studies.

The role of first responders during extreme crisis events consists of improvising under time pressure to retain control of the unfolding situation and mitigate harmful effects to help organizations restore their 'normal' functioning. This pervasive view of crises as cosmologic events obscures their transformational dimension and their long-term positive outcomes. In this article, we explore how actors respond to time pressure and vital stakes while identifying and actualizing a novel trajectory. They improvise to overcome limitations, create, and enact a desirable future to seize an opportunity that arises due to unexpected surprises. We argue that the actualization of novel trajectories relies on a combination of the enactment of a duplicate temporality that combines the chronological time-pressure of the unfolding event and kairotic time, in which critical decisions and actions actualize the desired future. Our contributions to the crisis management literature are twofold. First, we conceptualize chronological and kairotic improvisation practices to acknowledge that crisis response is not only about acting quickly but also about doing the right thing at the right time. Second, we shed light on crises as 'cosmologic' events, showing that they can be a point of origin for long-term positive outcomes. Finally, we advocate for a deeper and fine-grained consideration of time and temporality to advance crisis management studies.

Research has focused on episodic crises (e.g., fire extinguished), with regard to causality, management, and recovery. But some crises (e.g., illegal migration) are continuous, with no clear conclusion, and the nature and timing of the recovery phase are indeterminate. To explore the challenges facing leaders in a continuous crisis, we turn to ‘extreme fiction’ – a radically imaginative narrative of possible accidents, crises and disasters. The television series The Walking Dead is an example of a continuous crisis. This is also a novel crisis, which means that crisis management routines, protocols, and standard operating procedures may not apply, and the value of past experience may be limited. Our analysis offers a novel perspective on the nature of the crisis leadership role, by showing how a continuous crisis generates three paradoxical leadership agendas: managing the crisis (which includes unmanageable elements), managing conflict (while initiating and participating in conflict), and managing values (which may have to be temporarily abandoned). Our findings also demonstrate how contextual properties shape the leadership role in a continuous crisis.