Crisis leadership beyond the flame: a human-centered crisis expectations model and its implications for research, policy, and practice.

Disasters and crises disrupt lives and test the capacities of governments and organizations. While their immediate aftermath is often marked by uncertainty and disruption, recurrent patterns in how individuals are affected give rise to foreseeable hardships. Yet these human consequences, and what they imply for crisis leadership, remain underdeveloped in the crisis literature. 

This article advances a Human-Centered Crisis Expectations Model that conceptualizes, from the perspective of those affected, the crisis management challenge as an equation composed of six interrelated elements: primary exposure, damage and loss, procedural burden, social recognition, hope and perspective, and context. Together, these elements offer a human-centered evaluative logic for understanding and guiding crisis leadership. The model serves as both an analytical framework and a normative guide, suggesting that perceived effectiveness depends on the extent to which these elements are recognized and addressed throughout the full trajectory of a crisis—beyond the acute phase and well into recovery, which may extend over years depending on the scale and impact of loss and disruption. The article concludes by discussing implications for research, policy, and practice.