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Extreme fiction for leadership development
Umeå University, Faculty of Social Sciences, Umeå School of Business and Economics (USBE).ORCID iD: 0000-0003-3253-7243
Cranfield University, UK.
2025 (English)In: Management Learning, ISSN 1350-5076, E-ISSN 1461-7307, Vol. 56, no 3, p. 416-441Article in journal (Refereed) Published
Abstract [en]

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.

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
Sage Publications, 2025. Vol. 56, no 3, p. 416-441
Keywords [en]
Crisis leadership, extreme fiction, group dynamics, leadership, leadership development, police
National Category
Business Administration
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:umu:diva-228579DOI: 10.1177/13505076241258023ISI: 001287941800001Scopus ID: 2-s2.0-85200955272OAI: oai:DiVA.org:umu-228579DiVA, id: diva2:1890631
Funder
Riksbankens Jubileumsfond, P20-0763Available from: 2024-08-20 Created: 2024-08-20 Last updated: 2025-09-24Bibliographically approved

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Hällgren, Markus

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CiteExportLink to record
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Citation style
  • apa
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  • Other locale
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Output format
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  • asciidoc
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