THE POWER OF A CRISIS

A crisis breaks routines, which makes it dangerous—and useful. This chapter argues that when habits collapse, new ones can be installed quickly, sometimes by accident and sometimes by design.

In organizations, the temptation is to treat a crisis as a one-time event. The book treats it as a window: people are paying attention, rules are being rewritten, and leaders can choose what the new default will be.

The chapter shows how “unspoken” habits—who has authority, what gets escalated, what gets ignored—often cause disasters. After the damage, the rebuilding isn’t only technical. It’s behavioral.

The uncomfortable lesson is that habits don’t wait for permission. They form in the vacuum. If you don’t define the new routines after a crisis, the organization will—often in the worst possible way.

Organizations, Duhigg argues, run on habits and on the unspoken truces between rival groups that those habits encode, and a crisis is uniquely powerful because it shatters both, opening a brief window to install better routines. His central case is the 1987 King's Cross Underground fire in London, where a small, ignored fire grew lethal because the station's organizational habits had divided responsibility so neatly that no one department felt authorized to act on a problem that crossed boundaries. The truce that kept peace between divisions also guaranteed that warning signs fell through the cracks.

The disaster forced a reorganization that no ordinary reform could have achieved, because the crisis made the dysfunctional habits visible and stripped the political cover that normally protects them. Duhigg pairs this with Rhode Island Hospital, where toxic habits between surgeons and nurses produced fatal errors until public scandal broke the truce and allowed new safety routines to be imposed.

The chapter's uncomfortable insight is that wise leaders do not let a crisis go to waste; some quietly amplify a sense of crisis precisely to dislodge entrenched, harmful habits that calmer times would protect. The applied lesson cuts two ways: recognize that the routines and truces inside any organization are doing more than they appear, often hiding real risk, and understand that the disruption of a crisis, painful as it is, is often the only moment when those deep patterns can actually be rewritten.

The ethical tightrope is unavoidable: the same leaders who exploit a crisis to install lifesaving routines could exploit one to seize control, so the lesson is descriptive rather than a license. What every reader can take from it is diagnostic, that the calm, agreed-upon way an organization does things is often protecting a real danger, and that the disruption of a crisis, used honestly, is the rare chance to fix it.