Book Review – LEADING IN A STORM: Practical Leadership Strategies in Crisis Situations

Dr Dakuku Peterside’s Leading in a Storm arrives at a moment when Africa’s leadership deficit is no longer a matter of academic debate but of operational urgency. It is a structured, evidence-grounded manual for those who must govern when stability is absent, and the institutional environment offers no margin for error.

At a time when leadership failures carry immediate institutional and economic consequences, this review of the book positions “Leading in a Storm” as a disciplined framework for navigating crisis conditions. Olufemi Awoyemi highlights the book’s central argument that leadership in instability requires a distinct set of competencies beyond routine management. 

Drawing on evidence from African and global cases, the work connects sensemaking, communication, and strategic discipline to real-world governance outcomes. It speaks directly to executives, regulators, and board leaders operating in volatile environments, where context misreads and weak communication can amplify risk. The review underscores the book’s relevance as both a practical guide and a governance tool for building resilient institutions.

There is a particular kind of leadership failure that does not announce itself in advance. It surfaces gradually, in the space between what a leader was trained to do and what the moment actually demands. Dr Dakuku Peterside’s Leading in a Storm is, at its core, a serious attempt to close that space.

Dr Dakuku Peterside is a Nigerian public policy expert, leadership strategist, and former Director-General of the Nigerian Maritime Administration and Safety Agency, where he led institutional reforms in a complex, high-risk regulatory environment. His career spans public service, political leadership, and advisory roles, including serving as Commissioner for Works in Rivers State and as a member of the House of Representatives.

He is the founder of the Centre for Leadership, Strategy and Development, where he focuses on governance, institutional capacity, and leadership development across Africa. Trained in leadership and public policy, Peterside combines academic grounding with frontline experience managing crises, regulatory transitions, and stakeholder tensions.

This blend of operational leadership, policy insight, and governance practice underpins his authority to write ’Leading in a Storm’, positioning him as a practitioner with direct experience of leading under pressure.

The book was written from an explicitly African vantage point. It is a practitioner-informed framework for leaders who operate in environments where crisis is not an exception but a persistent feature of the landscape.

The book’s central premises are direct and well-grounded. The skills and behaviours that sustain leaders through normal operating conditions are structurally insufficient when those conditions deteriorate rapidly. Crisis leadership is not simply intensified routine leadership. It is a qualitatively different discipline, and it demands deliberate preparation.

Peterside does not leave this premise in the abstract. He anchors it in a carefully assembled portfolio of African and global crisis events, from the Al-Shabaab attack on Nairobi’s Westgate Mall, to bank failures in South Africa, to the civil disruptions that followed Nigeria’s June 12 political crisis of 1993. Each case is deployed not for dramatic effect but to illuminate a distinct leadership competency under pressure.

The Competency Framework Provided

The architecture of the book follows its argument faithfully. Each chapter corresponds to a core competency. The framework builds on five competencies originally identified by leadership scholars Ronald Riggio and Toby Newstead, namely sensemaking, effective decision-making, coordinating teamwork, facilitating learning, and communication.

To these, Peterside adds three of his own, drawn from direct experience working with crisis leaders in African institutional contexts. The additions are the capacity to comprehend context, the capacity to project composure and self-assurance, and the capacity to think strategically while executing multiple plans simultaneously. The result is an eight-competency framework that is both academically anchored and practically informed.

The opening chapter on context is among the most instructive. Peterside’s argument here is structural rather than anecdotal. He contends that leadership choices are only as sound as the contextual intelligence that informs them. A leader who misreads the operating environment will deploy the right capabilities at the wrong moment or apply stable-state thinking to an unstable situation. This is a governance insight of real significance. In Nigerian public and institutional life, context is frequently misread, and the consequences manifest in policy responses that are either premature, insufficient, or misaligned with the actual dynamics of the crisis at hand.

Sensemaking and Communication Under Pressure

The chapter on sensemaking extends this logic into the epistemic dimension of leadership. In chaotic conditions, the primary challenge is not a shortage of information but a surplus of ambiguous, contradictory, and incomplete signals. The leader who can impose interpretive structure on this noise, who can determine what is actually happening and why, is the leader who retains the capacity to act decisively. Peterside’s treatment of this subject is measured and precise. He does not overstate the role of intuition, nor does he undervalue the analytical discipline required to make sense of fast-moving events.

The communication chapter deserves particular attention in the context of Nigerian institutional culture. Peterside makes the case that transparent, truthful, consistent, and multi-channel communication is not a peripheral function of crisis management but a central one. Institutions that communicate poorly in a crisis do not merely suffer reputational damage. They accelerate the erosion of stakeholder confidence precisely when that confidence is most strategically valuable. The analysis maps directly onto the communication failures observed in several Nigerian banking and regulatory crises over the past two decades, in which information gaps were filled by speculation, which hardened into sentiment risk.

Strategy, Capital Discipline, and Governance Relevance

The strategic chapter reinforces a point that capital market practitioners and governance professionals will recognise immediately. Effective crisis management is not reactive improvisation. It requires the ability to hold a long-term strategic orientation while simultaneously managing short-term operational disruptions. This dual-axis capacity, which Peterside describes as the ability to see the big picture while navigating immediate instability, is the competency that distinguishes organisations that emerge from crises structurally stronger from those that emerge weakened and re-rated downward by investors and analysts alike.

Chapter 8, which argues for crisis leaders to adopt a growth orientation, carries particular weight for institutional risk managers and board directors. The instinct during a crisis is often to contain, to minimise, and to survive. Peterside’s argument is that this instinct, however understandable, is incomplete. A well-managed crisis is also a dataset. It reveals structural vulnerabilities, tests governance frameworks, and exposes the gap between policy and practice. Leaders who treat the crisis as an episode to endure rather than a process from which to learn forfeit the opportunity to build more resilient institutions on the other side.

Leading in a Storm: Practical Leadership Strategies in Crisis Situations by Dr Dakuku Peterside is available for purchase on Amazon.

 

About the AUTHOR

Olufemi M. AWOYEMI FCA, FCTI, FCIB, F.CIoD, FIIM, FERM, FICA, FIAPM, ACS, mni is the founder of Proshare LLC, Nigeria’s leading financial information hub. You can follow him on X or email him at ceo@proshare.co