Leadership for crisis management: flexibility in curriculum design for competence development
Abstract as pdf
Corresponding Author:
Rasa Smaliukiene
The General J. Zemaitis Military Academy of Lithuania Lithuania
rasa.smaliukiene@lka.lt
Author(s):
Over the past two decades crisis leadership has become a comprehensive, wide developed and viable topic as none of the innovative and unique solutions in crisis management happens without strong leadership. At the same time, creating an effective leadership development program for crisis management is a challenging task as the crisis environments becomes highly complex and dynamic, increasingly faced with cascading disasters. This changing nature of crisis requires not only flexibility in the times of event, but also in the preparation and development of competencies for crisis management and leadership. The competence development programmes have to be flexible and open for new knowledge from the field and unbarred for immediate adaptation to changing environments.
Taking military education in Lithuania as a case study, the authors examine how crisis leadership development programmes are created and how a flexible curriculum that responds to the complex, dynamic, and high-risk environment is composed. A qualitative study using semi-structured interviews and reviews of program documents was used in exploring the context, composition, and sources of the curriculum.
The research results indicate that a flexible curriculum is created using a “buffet” principle, when study subjects, pedagogical methods, and techniques are freely borrowed from the leading practices in education, military, and civil practice. International cooperation under EU and NATO enables educational institutions to take over best practices, use second opinion from outside as institutions do not treat each other as competitors. This resulting curriculum has advantage of being easy to update and highly dynamic as well as the disadvantage of being segmented and discontinuous.
Cascading disasters: how to design resilient crisis-management institutions and organizations?