In this edition of Author Talks, McKinsey Senior Partner Scott Blackburn welcomes back Marina Nitze, partner in the crisis engineering firm Layer Aleph, about Crisis Engineering: Time-Tested Tools for Turning Chaos into Clarity (Balance/Hachette Book Group, Spring 2026), coauthored with Matthew Weaver and Mikey Dickerson. Sharing lessons from major public- and private-sector crises, Nitze explores how moments of crisis can lead to rapid transformation in organizations that would otherwise resist it. She examines why some systems evolve under pressure while others remain stuck—and how leaders can leverage disruption to rethink systems and drive lasting change. An edited version of the conversation follows.
What is crisis engineering?
Crisis engineering is harnessing a crisis to make rapid transformational change. A complex system is any system that’s made of humans and computers. The computer part is generally pretty easy to change. And the human part is very difficult to change. But if certain crisis conditions are present, you can transform the human part of a system very rapidly. Crisis engineering is about how to recognize those indicators and then harness that moment to make rapid change against the human part of your system, and probably the computer part, too.
Why did you write this book? Why is it relevant in this moment?
Our book has become particularly relevant right now. When I worked in the federal government, I regularly had “Chicken Little experiences,” where I would think something was a crisis. I would begin screaming about it, but it felt like everyone else was operating business as usual.
Yet sometimes there would be a different circumstance. Suddenly we could rapidly get a ton of things done and have resources to hire and procure. Doors would unlock. I was really interested in what made the difference in those situations. Once I left government and became what we now call ourselves, “crisis engineers”—working on crises in the private and public sectors—we delved into the academic research.
Crisis engineering is harnessing a crisis to make rapid transformational change.
The goal was to figure out what makes these circumstances? What are the indicators of a crisis, of a situation where you can rapidly make this change? And what are the situations where you can’t pivot? In those cases, you will deploy a different tool kit. It’s important to differentiate between the two.
I often see many people use the word “crisis” in a different way than we would, such as to describe a budget or a housing crisis. Those are definitely problems. But they’re not crises in the same sense that you can use them to make sweeping, transformational change very quickly.
We worked at the US Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) together during a time of crisis. In some instances, VA didn’t change its behavior, but in other instances, we were able to make major changes very quickly. Why was this?
There are five indicators of crisis. In a given situation, you don’t have to have all five necessarily, but you have to have most of them.
One, there’s fundamental surprise: You were not expecting this to happen; it wasn’t on your radar or calendar.
Two, high visibility: Everyone is talking about it. In the case of the VA, we appear on the news all the time. The president has noticed and has called meetings about the situation. That high visibility applies pressure such that people want to make a change.
Three, a rigid deadline: The situation will occur regardless. Consider Ticketmaster selling Taylor Swift tickets. There’s a concert and it will take place whether or not you want it to happen. You can’t delay it for two weeks.
Four, a breakdown in core process. In the case of VA, a differentiation would be that the disability claims process was problematic, but it was chronic—it happened over years. That was a fundamental breakdown of what we were supposed to be able to do. And that caused us to want to make rapid change.
And five, a breakdown in “sensemaking,” which is a term that Karl Weick, an organizational theorist, helped formalize in the 1960s referring to how our brains work. If you’ve read Daniel Kahneman’s book Thinking, Fast and Slow, our brains are constantly assembling the facts in our environment to construct a story of our reality.
We may not like it, but our brains prefer plausible stories over entirely accurate stories. So, we often tell ourselves a story that may not be the factual reality. But we don’t realize it until we’re in a crisis moment. A breakdown in sensemaking occurs when people go to work knowing their role and suddenly return to find a fundamental role shift. As a result, they don’t know what to do and what their place is.
Our brains hate cognitive dissonance. This is the key to crisis engineering. You want to leverage that window of time so that when people reform their story of the world and how it works, it reforms in the way that you want it to.
For example, when we were at VA, at a point it became very apparent that veterans were not able to enroll in healthcare. Before then, the story was that veterans don’t use the internet. We had data. It showed that very few veterans had ever enrolled in VA healthcare online, yet there are 20 million veterans in America. And there are hundreds of thousands of paper applications.
Our story—our sensemaking—was just that’s how the world worked. Then we sat down with a tech-savvy veteran who showed us how he could not get through the process. He described the process of enrolling in VA healthcare as like going through a door that was spiked with bombs and IEDs.
Once the inability of veterans to enroll in healthcare became apparent, it opened the door very rapidly to the idea that we could not do business as usual. We could not just type those applications faster. We had to fundamentally transform the way that we enabled veterans to enroll in healthcare.
You feature some historical crises, as well as modern ones that you experienced firsthand. What were some common themes? What surprised you in your research?
We often refer to the Mann Gulch fire.1 We love the book Young Men and Fire by Norman Maclean. Karl Weick wrote a paper on sensemaking and the Mann Gulch fire, and it has a lot of related history. The focus was on where those [five] crisis indicators were present and where you could leverage them, versus where you could not.
The Mann Gulch fire was a huge breakdown in sensemaking. Smoke jumpers jumped into what they thought was a routine fire. They thought they were going to be back home by lunch. At the end of the day, almost all of them died in a multiple breakdown of sensemaking and how they thought it worked.
Three Mile Island is an example of a situation where we are still experiencing the international impact of that crisis, in terms of nuclear power and people’s feelings of safety in the world. Ultimately, in the moment that the crisis occurred, they had eight minutes to resolve it. And they weren’t going to be able to do it. For that one, it’s about looking upstream at what could have been done differently.
The HealthCare.gov story is personal because we were there. My colleagues [and coauthors], Matthew Weaver and Mikey Dickerson, managed the HealthCare.gov rescue during different years. The story became a lesson in optimism, especially for the public sector.
But the lesson of what’s possible in a crisis works in the private sector, too. You had the ability to hire people rapidly in government which, for anybody who’s ever tried to do that, is pretty rare. You had the ability to reorganize resources, change priorities, make 55 teams suddenly work together in a way that they hadn’t before.
We would argue that there was no way to do that outside of a crisis. Most people think the word “crisis” is a bad word, one that they want to avoid. I’m not saying that I’m glad that the HealthCare.gov situation happened. That is not the message. But because it happened, we were able to emerge from that far stronger, with the right team and the right approach, and then set that example for subsequent teams to be stronger and more resilient.
You write about needing a “crisis tool kit.” What needs to be in that tool kit?
The core of a crisis tool kit is a crisis engineering center. At McKinsey, you refer to it as a “nerve center.” We have a very similar concept. There must be a physical room where people convene in person. You need a convening authority—a CEO, or senior staffer—who will say, “This is a crisis. This is a high priority for everybody. Everybody needs to focus on this.” If you’re called into the room, you need to go there above all else.
You will also need an incident lead to oversee that room. The lead will assemble a team. We’ve seen crisis teams be a team of two; but there could be a team of ten. The team will follow the two-pizza rule [team size is not made up of more people than could be fed with two pizzas]. Very rapidly, at a high level, that team will assemble a new map of the world. As discussed, if you are in a crisis, definitionally your map of how the world works is broken in some way. You will need to assemble a new map.
The process of assembling that new map collectively is going to change based on the story that you create through sensemaking. Different people will have different perspectives on how the world works—their role, how they will emerge from the crisis, and how the world should work.
When you tackle that together, you will not debate at a table about how to move forward. You might talk for a few minutes, assemble a few good ideas, speak with a few experts. You will want to try to turn the system on and off, deploy the online form, change the policy, and then see what happens. Based on that, you will update your map and then continue on in a circle until you’ve ideally evolved from that very quickly into a better reality than you went into it with.
How have advances in AI changed the threats and responses you see in the world of crisis engineering? What about externally generated crises?
AI is a great business development for crisis engineers because there are many ways that crises can occur that did not exist a short while ago. Those crises could range from taking down your call center because now there is automation at a volume at which humans could not act. The idea of having an escalation path, or even a coupon code that you give to just a few people, will rapidly disappear.
Human attention is no longer the rate limiter for whether or not you’re going to have your website taken down by an attack or a bug exploited in your application. Everything we do now involves a computer in some way. You may think you’re not a tech company, and that may be true. But I’m willing to bet that your human resources, your finance, your sales and complete supply chain is all on tech stack. There will be many vulnerabilities that AI can exploit. People might panic at the thought.
We want a lot more crises to be leveraged for positive transformational change and not just tolerated for the minimum amount of time possible to get through it.
What if an AI bot generates a fake video of your CEO making a promise or sharing bad news, and that triggers your stock price to change fundamentally? There are a lot of very interesting and creative ways that AI can be very disruptive in ways that people will not be excited about.
If you are prepared to jump when the crisis happens, so you know where your crisis engineering room will be, what your map will be, and who will be your incident lead, you might be poised to emerge far stronger than you went in, not even knowing what that externally generated crisis might be.
After a crisis is resolved, what are best practices to ensure that an organization is more resilient?
That’s really the core of crisis engineering. People often get through the crisis because the timeline passed. But what you really want to say is, “What broke down in my environment that caused that fundamental surprise, that caused that breakdown in my core process? And how can I fundamentally change something about my environment? Do I need to change my people, my incentives, my hiring—the structure of our process?”
People often ask: “What does that mean?” And I say: Everybody has an idea of that thing that they’ve wanted to change in their environment for a long time that feels immovable. The crisis window is really their opportunity to do so.
That 24-hour, 48-hour, seven-day window [of a crisis] is when you might get the changes made that otherwise would take decades, if they can be made at all.
They also ask: “How do I create crisis?” We would argue that you can’t really create one easily. The visibility lever is certainly there. This can be dangerous, but you could certainly increase the visibility of an issue that you believe to be occurring.
We are pretty obsessed with Anthony Downs, who wrote Inside Bureaucracy. He has a concept called “rearview metrics.” By the time that the metrics are synthesized and summarized at seven different levels over three months, your executive briefing is not particularly attached to reality.
One thing that we often see emerging from a crisis is that we want a new and real-time sense of truth, whether that’s the size of your backlog at different points, or the bottlenecks at each point in your supply chain.
What have you learned that was not trustworthy or not accurate last time that you now know to be different? Just having the muscle to build a crisis response is really important. Knowing where the room is. Who’s your crisis person? What are your crisis communications channels?
There’s a tool kit in place that you can have so that you’re far more ready next time. It’s a little counterintuitive, but the less experienced you are at crisis engineering, the more that your crisis response will need to involve trying lots of things. Once you have that muscle, then you may have more accurate maps, teams, and more known and trustworthy relationships that you can rely on in future crises.
You may not be able to use a crisis tool kit. But that doesn’t mean that a crisis can’t hit, or a bridge can’t collapse. I don’t want bridges to collapse. But if the bridge does collapse, I want you to have in your back pocket the rezoning and environmental, procurement, and bridge-building rules that you want to be the new normal because that 24-hour, 48-hour, seven-day window [of a crisis] is when you might get the changes made that otherwise would take decades, if they can be made at all.
What impact do you hope this book will have? What would success look like?
We hope that this book creates a lot more crisis engineers. You might be a CEO or a leader—in which case maybe you’re not going to be the crisis engineer directly—but you’re going to want to foster that capability in your agency or your organization.
Maybe you are in the field and you see huge changes that you need to make in your organization, and you’re not quite sure how to make them. Crisis engineering is a missing tool kit in a lot of organizations.
It’s a muscle that can be built and grown. And that’s really what we want to see through the writing of this book. We want a lot more crises to be leveraged for positive transformational change and not just tolerated for the minimum amount of time possible to get through it.
