The Architecture of Strategic Influence

Here's what nobody tells you about senior roles: the higher you rise, the less authority you actually have. That director you need aligned? She reports to a different secretary. The resources you need? Controlled by an agency following different protocols. The timeline? Set by someone who wasn't in the coordination call.

This course examines crisis leadership where org charts become suggestions and influence matters more than rank. You'll learn how strategic thinking evolved from military command structures adapts to environments where every "order" needs three committees to approve it.

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Understanding Crisis Leadership

Sun Tzu's wisdom about knowing yourself and your terrain takes on new meaning when your terrain is a conference call with seventeen agencies. The battlefield isn't geographic—it's institutional. Your adversary isn't an enemy force—it's entropy, miscommunication, and competing priorities.

Robert Fagan translates hard-won military strategy to civilian complexity. What happens when your "direct reports" are actually peer executives who can ignore you? How do you maintain momentum when every participant has veto power? When does collaborative leadership become paralysis, and how do you prevent it?

This isn't theoretical leadership development. It's practical frameworks for when FEMA, state agencies, hospitals, utilities, and NGOs all need to move in the same direction but nobody can make them. Drawing from both ancient strategic wisdom and modern emergency operations, you'll learn to orchestrate where you can't order

Crisis Lab Course: Strategic Crisis Leadership

Course Highlights and Learning

Compare leadership and crisis leadership: Discover why your normal executive skills become liabilities at 3 AM when six agencies need decisions but three are offline.
Apply strategic wisdom to modern challenges: Learn why Sun Tzu’s psychological warfare principles work better in interagency meetings than battlefields.
Assess organizational crisis readiness: Find out which of your organizational strengths will evaporate under pressure (hint: it’s usually the ones you’re proudest of).
Build personal crisis capabilities: Develop the mental models that let you process incomplete information faster than committees can form.
Create practical preparedness measures: Design protocols simple enough to remember when exhausted, clear enough to work across agencies.

Topics Covered

Module 1: Know Thyself

Most leaders discover their crisis personality the hard way—during an actual crisis. This module helps you find yours beforehand. Learn why confident executives become hesitant coordinators, why collaborative leaders suddenly turn autocratic, and what your stress responses reveal about your leadership instincts.

Module 2: Know Thy Enemy

Your enemy isn't the hurricane or cyberattack—it's what crisis does to human psychology and institutional behavior. Understand how time pressure warps judgment, why information gaps create tribal knowledge, and how cascading failures follow predictable patterns. If you know the psychology, you can counter it.

Module 3: Know Thy Organization and Thy Staff

Organizations have personalities too, and crisis reveals them starkly. That innovative culture you've built? It might become chaos when procedures matter. That strict hierarchy? It might save lives or create bottlenecks. Learn to read organizational behavior under stress before stress does it for you.

Module 4: Putting It All Together

Theory matters until phones start ringing. This module converts concepts into tools: decision frameworks that work at 3 AM, communication protocols that survive infrastructure failure, and authority structures that flex without breaking. Build the simple systems that enable complex coordination.

Module 5: FAQ Session

Fagan answers what executives really want to know: How do you get buy-in for crisis preparation when there's no crisis? What's the minimum viable crisis leadership structure? How do you maintain readiness when staff turnover? When should you ignore your own protocols?

Learn from our Instructor

Robert Fagan
Senior Emergency Manager and Exercise Planner
Global Eagle Consulting

Col. Robert Fagan (Retired) learned crisis leadership where mistakes cost lives. Thirty years in the Army, including combat deployments and UN operations, taught him how command works when it works—and why it often doesn't. Now he translates those lessons for civilian leaders who have responsibility without rank.

Certified at every level that matters (CEM nationally and in Virginia, Master Military Emergency Manager), he's also done the executive education circuit—Harvard's Leadership in Crisis, Yale's Leading Through Crisis. But his real credential? Building actual preparedness cultures in organizations that thought they were already prepared.

Get a Glimpse Inside the Course through the Crisis Lab Podcast

Are you intrigued by the course but still have some lingering questions?

Our exclusive podcast, an in-depth conversation with crisis management expert Mr. Robert Fagan, offers a sneak peek into the rich content and enlightening discussions you can expect in the course.

This podcast serves as a preview and introduction to the topics that will be extensively discussed in the course. So, if you're still on the fence, why not take a listen? It could be the perfect opportunity to get a taste of what's to come and help you make your decision. Ready to explore the world of resilience? Listen to the podcast now, it’s free!

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Crisis Lab Podcast: Strategic Crisis Leadership

Who Should Enroll

This course serves professionals who've discovered their crisis role involves herding cats—if cats were federal agencies:

Federal emergency coordinators who mediate between agencies with competing mandates
State emergency management directors juggling federal requirements and local realities
Military liaison officers translating between command structures and civilian consensus
Hospital system executives coordinating competitors during public health emergencies
Critical infrastructure directors managing dependencies nobody mapped until they failed
International organization representatives aligning countries that agree on nothing
Municipal executives making regional decisions with neighborhood-level authority
Private sector crisis leaders learning that profit motive doesn't motivate government partners

If you're tired of leadership books written by people who've never run a 3 AM coordination call, this course speaks your language.

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Hear what our students are saying about our courses

Our students range from public to private sector, and from major tech companies to government agencies.

Earn CEUs through IACET-accredited courses

IACET accreditation means something when defending training budgets. Crisis Lab maintains these standards because credentials matter to bureaucracies, even if wisdom matters more to operations.

The International Association for Continuing Education and Training (IACET) keeps everyone honest about educational quality. Our accreditation proves you're investing in serious capability development, not just checking professional development boxes.

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Purchase Individual Course

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