Remembering Dr. Ian Mitroff

A year ago today, we lost Ian Mitroff.

I want to take a moment to honour and celebrate his legacy.

One of the most influential systems thinkers and crisis scholars of our time, Ian was also an extraordinary human being. I am immensely grateful for his mentorship and our friendship – and still find myself reaching for his words when I am trying to wrap my head around complex challenges.

We first met after I read Ian’s book Why Some Companies Emerge Stronger and Better from a Crisis. I sent him a quick note on LinkedIn to say how much I enjoyed it. To my surprise, Ian wrote back. That was the beginning of many Zoom conversations, presentations and writing collaborations. Ian was the first guest in my Resilience Unfiltered Q&A coffee chat series – and the reason I decided to keep it going.

To Ian, crisis management was far more than an academic discipline. He saw it as an essential leadership capability closely linked to strategic planning and the public good. 

There’s a lot I could say about Ian’s ideas and the impact they had on me. For brevity, I’ll stick to three themes. 

Thinking systemically is the most critical skill in crisis planning

Ian saw crises as wicked messes, or systems of highly interactive, ill-structured problems. In a wicked mess, seemingly unrelated or improbable events collide to create an even bigger mess. The right solutions may seem obvious in hindsight, but, in real time, organizations struggle to cope.

Ian warned about the dangers of oversimplification. He believed one of the biggest failures in traditional risk management is the illusion of control created through codified playbooks and “canned exercises” that don’t reflect the complexity of a real crisis. Ian often quoted his mentor, Russ Ackoff: “Nature is not organized the way universities are.” In other words, real-world problems don’t come in neat boxes.

Ian also observed that managers are often drawn to quantifiable risks because they offer a false sense of certainty. They create a comfort zone. Crisis management pulls in the opposite direction. It pushes leaders into a discomfort zone where they must confront ambiguity and the messy interconnectedness of complex problems stretching across systems, disciplines and human dynamics.

Crises create a need for sense-making

Major crises are the moments that force us to ask whether the world, our work and our lives still make sense. They raise existential questions about meaning, identity and safety. We can grow in the face of adversity – if we find a way to make sense of what’s happening.

Ian distinguished between normal accidents – disruptions that can be anticipated and planned for – and abnormal catastrophes, which are extraordinary, boundary-breaking crises that fall outside the realm of known unknowns.

We can prepare for power outages, food safety recalls or localized flooding with specific response protocols. But crises like the 9/11 attacks, the COVID-19 pandemic or the Fukushima nuclear disaster don’t follow predictable patterns. They don’t just disrupt operations. They shatter belief systems.

These types of crises can’t be managed with codified playbooks. They call for flexible thinking, values-based leadership and, often, a reformulation of the very assumptions our worldviews rest on.

Ian believed crisis leadership is ultimately about helping people get through these moments, grieve what’s been lost (including deeply held beliefs) and begin the hard work of making space for new meaning to emerge.

Acting on early warning signals is the best form of crisis management

Ian paid particular attention to early signal detection and scenario planning. He believed that many crises are preceded by warning signs. Unfortunately, too often, those signals are ignored. In crisis-prone organizations, ordinary risks can quickly escalate into adverse events that threaten stakeholders, reputations and bottom lines. For example, cyberattacks can go on undetected for months. The longer they remain unnoticed, the more damage they can cause.

Proactive organizations recognize early warning signals and act on them. They prevent escalation, mitigate risk and prepare for a broader range of crisis types than those they have already experienced. Above all, they brace for worst-case scenarios.

To help leaders “think the unthinkable,” Ian and his colleagues brought a “crisis wheel” to their workshops. Participants would spin it, land on a random type of crisis and discuss how they would handle it. The exercise pushed them out of their comfort zones into creative, systems-level thinking. That’s the kind of mindset needed to build resilience.

Ian was brilliant. So was every conversation with him. But what I miss the most is his kindness. He often asked about my family, and talked about his. We even discovered we shared Belarusian roots.

I feel incredibly lucky to have known Ian and hope I can encourage others the way he encouraged me.