What if the greatest organizational transformations don’t happen despite crises, but because of them?
While recognition of opportunities created by crises appears across diverse fields — from business leadership to modern crisis management guidelines — systematic frameworks for capturing transformation opportunities during complex, multi-system disruptions remain underdeveloped.
Consider the extraordinary healthcare transformation during the COVID-19 pandemic. Before the pandemic, telehealth visits accounted for just 0.1% of Medicare primary care visits. By mid-2020, that number had surged to 43.5%. This wasn’t merely a technological upgrade — it represented a fundamental transformation across multiple systems that had previously resisted change for decades.
Before exploring transformation opportunities, we must acknowledge that polycrises exact enormous human costs — lives lost, livelihoods destroyed, communities devastated. The healthcare transformation we examine occurred amid profound suffering. Recognizing transformation possibilities doesn’t diminish these tragedies; rather, it honors them by ensuring that organizational changes create lasting value from necessary adaptations made during crisis.
What made this rapid transformation possible was the presence of a polycrisis — multiple, causally connected crisis disruptions that amplify and accelerate one another’s effects across different systems. These crisis conditions created a unique environment where long-standing barriers to change were temporarily suspended, enabling transformative experiences that would have been impossible under normal circumstances.
For leaders, this creates unprecedented opportunities. As organizations navigate leadership in disruption, those that recognize and capitalize on transformation windows during polycrisis can achieve significant organizational change while others struggle.
3 Ways Polycrisis Creates Transformation Windows
First, it temporarily aligns stakeholder interests that typically conflict. When healthcare providers, insurers, regulators, and patients all faced a shared existential threat, their typically divergent priorities suddenly aligned around survival and continuity of care.
Second, crisis conditions force unprecedented collaboration across traditional organizational boundaries. Departments that had operated in silos found themselves working together out of necessity, breaking down the territorial barriers that typically prevent comprehensive change.
Finally, the immediate urgency disrupts established vested interests. The pressing need for alternative care delivery temporarily overcame the economic and political forces that maintained the status quo, allowing innovation to bypass traditional gatekeepers.
While acknowledging the profound human costs of crisis, we’ve observed this transformation pattern across industries. During interviews with leaders about their polycrisis experiences, one executive noted, “Changes we’d been trying to implement for 3 years suddenly happened in 3 weeks because everyone could see they were essential for survival.” Organizations that had long resisted operational changes suddenly found themselves capable of remarkable adaptation when they had no alternative.
These transformation windows also reveal organizational vulnerabilities. The disruption exposed the myths and narratives used to justify stagnation while simultaneously revealing the true costs of maintaining the status quo. As one leader observed, when traditional workplace boundaries dissolved, some employees “became very self-centric. They only devoted their time to their specific function, and they stopped connecting with other people across the organization.” Another executive pointed out that “the lack of alignment during crisis is what creates waste in energy and resources and potentially results in significant financial losses that you see when you look at the bottom line.”
This dual nature of transformation windows — creating opportunities while exposing vulnerabilities — reveals why understanding polycrisis dynamics is crucial for leaders who want to leverage transformation opportunities rather than merely get through them.
When System-Wide Barriers Suddenly Dissolve
The healthcare transformation succeeded because changes occurred simultaneously across 4 interconnected systems — something that’s typically impossible to achieve under normal conditions, as detailed in our research on telemedicine transformation during polycrisis.
Healthcare organizations rapidly reconfigured their IT infrastructure while government agencies modified policies that had previously limited telemedicine adoption through relaxed HIPAA enforcement, reimbursement parity, and adjusted licensure requirements. Simultaneously, provider–patient relationships shifted as care delivery moved online with new virtual workflows, while financial models evolved through new billing codes, government funding, and expanded insurance coverage.
This integrated transformation approach demonstrates how polycrisis can enable comprehensive system-wide change that addresses root causes rather than just symptoms.
How to Lock in Polycrisis-Driven Gains Before They Disappear
Here’s the crucial challenge for organizations that can responsibly navigate polycrisis conditions: polycrisis-driven change can recede without sustained leadership. As the pandemic’s immediate pressures subsided, many emergency telehealth policies began to be rolled back, and some organizations reverted to pre-crisis practices. The temporary suspension of resistance doesn’t automatically lead to permanent transformation — it creates an opportunity that leaders must actively capture and institutionalize.
The following actions extend established crisis management principles to polycrisis conditions. Moving from reactive innovation to sustainable transformation in polycrisis requires leaders to execute 6 actions that recognize the temporary nature of transformation windows. These interdependent actions often overlap during crisis periods, creating a systematic approach to capturing and embedding crisis-driven innovations.
Recognition requires leaders to actively scan for possible innovations during polycrisis and identify which represent fundamental improvements rather than emergency workarounds. This demands disciplined observation during chaotic periods, distinguishing between short-term adaptations and changes that could provide lasting value. Recognition also requires systematic documentation of choices and innovations as they emerge, enabling later evaluation of which adaptations delivered lasting organizational value.
Mobilization requires leaders to implement decisive changes while transformation windows remain open. This means rapidly deploying resources, adjusting workflows, and making operational changes before barriers reassert themselves. In the healthcare example, leaders mobilized IT infrastructure changes, policy modifications, and new care delivery models while creating regulatory flexibility. Mobilization often includes fast-tracking technology investments that organizations had previously approached incrementally. Leaders who rapidly upgrade digital infrastructure during transformation windows create dual benefits: immediate crisis response capability and enhanced competitive positioning for post-crisis operations, as research on crisis-driven organizational change demonstrates.
Navigation requires leaders to guide teams through the complex multi-system changes that polycrisis transformation demands, coordinating across traditional organizational boundaries and managing interdependencies between internal operations and external systems that don’t typically interact. This requires leaders to support teams as they navigate unfamiliar cross-system relationships and manage the stress of operating outside established workflows.
Formalization of innovation becomes critical as crisis pressures begin to ease — developing systematic processes to document, evaluate, and formalize innovations before they dissipate. Organizations may discover valuable new capabilities during polycrisis but lose them as teams return to familiar pre-crisis routines. Successful leaders create explicit mechanisms to capture and evaluate these innovations while they’re still fresh and accessible. Effective retention includes systematic evaluation of new operational approaches and revenue models that emerge during crisis response. This involves conducting comprehensive assessments that examine crisis innovations alongside traditional response elements, specifically identifying which new approaches could strengthen ongoing organizational capabilities while capturing insights that can drive lasting improvement.
Reinforcement involves embedding successful changes and crisis-driven insights into the organization’s permanent infrastructure through revised policies, technology systems, education programs, and incentive structures. This typically occurs after the immediate crisis but builds on the foundation created through earlier concurrent actions. Many transformation efforts fail here: Leaders assume that successful crisis adaptations will naturally persist, but without deliberate reinforcement, old patterns typically reassert themselves.
Resilience requires leaders to develop organizational capacity for continuous adaptation rather than episodic change. Rather than simply preparing for the next crisis, resilient organizations develop ongoing practices to sense environmental shifts and adapt their operations proactively. Resilient organizations also restructure around network orchestration models, leveraging partnerships and alliances developed during crisis. By moving beyond traditional organizational boundaries, resilient organizations create value through strategic networks and collaborative relationships forged during transformation periods.
These actions help organizations avoid the common pattern where polycrisis leads to temporary innovation followed by regression to pre-polycrisis practices — essentially wasting the window for transformation that polycrisis creates.
Preparing for the Next Transformation Window
As we face an era of increasing polycrisis, organizations that learn to leverage transformation windows can turn disruption into opportunity, while those that don’t may simply struggle to survive each crisis.
The question isn’t whether your organization will face polycrisis — it’s whether you’ll be ready to recognize transformation windows when they open and have the capacity to mobilize quickly to capture the opportunities as they emerge.
The next transformation window is coming. The organizations that thrive will be those that are ready to recognize it, act decisively within it, and sustain the changes long after the polycrisis ends.
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