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As fundamental tests of presidential leadership and organizational capacity, crises can make or break an administration. This article presents a conceptual analysis of what makes any crisis situation challenging to deal with, and it develops a set of analytical steps that can help crisis managers diagnose particular crisis situations they might face. The proposed crisis navigation framework brings together case research studies and theories of organizational processes, so that those assuming responsibility for steering the government and society through crises—including the Obama administration—have a useful point of entry into the growing crisis management literature.

The COVID-19 pandemic has triggered turbulent times across the globe, reminding us of the highly multidimensional and interdependent nature of today's world. Next to diverging national attempts to constrain the spread of the virus, numerous international organizations worked intensely to minimize the impacts of the disease on a regional or/and global scale. Albeit not considered a conventional agency responsible for global infectious diseases, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has surprisingly been one of the most proactive IOs in the pandemic response. In this context, this article examines to what extent the OECD's COVID-19 pandemic response adheres to the role of a global crisis manager. By adapting the theoretical concepts of crisis leadership, we explore the extent of sense-making, decision-making, and learning capacities of the OECD during the pandemic, upon which we draw the organization's position-making. Based on expert interviews and document analysis, this article illustrates that the OECD's concerns regarding the pandemic's severe effects across socioeconomic sectors focused exclusively on its member states. This sense-making enabled prompt and multilayered top-down as well as bottom-up decision-making to provide member states with policy options as solutions to the new challenges. However, the OECD's engagement during the crisis was proactive only to the extent that several limitations allowed, such as resource inflexibility and internal dynamics between the Secretariat and member states. In conclusion, we argue that the OECD did not present itself to be a global crisis manager during the COVID-19 pandemic. Rather, the IO's responses consolidated its position-making as a policy advisor for member states.

This competency model of a crisis manager has been developed based on cooperation with managers and experts in the field of crisis management. The brainwriting method was used to generate an overview of the competencies expected of a crisis manager. Using a mind map three basic groups of competencies were developed. The participants used Saaty's method to determine the significance of individual competencies. The different attributes of individual competencies according to the level of their development were established. Finally all individual competencies were assigned a target value which indicates the expected level of competence for the position of a crisis manager. The model of competencies is a practical tool for the establishment of crisis management system in a company.