Tales of the Unexpected

Abstract

This chapter explores the potential for strategic organizational frameworks and applied methodological perspectives to aid workforce contexts in harnessing the transferable agency of those equipped experientially for leadership in times of unprecedented crisis. Academic research and scholarship must be needs-led not methods-driven, and as the recent pandemic demonstrated, authentic leadership had never been more important. Transitional change through the crisis of the global pandemic led to shifts to greater acknowledgement of the need for a different type of knowledge creation and replacing the contexts of validity and reliability in empirical research with those of trustworthiness and authenticity. In providing some of these organizational frameworks and methodological perspectives in an accessible manner, many can be systematically applied to the context of everyday strategic planning and institutional management settings so that tangible target outcomes are visible, achievable, and perhaps, most importantly, remain person-centered.