Episode Details

What happens when the plan stops working? This episode breaks down what real crisis leadership looks like. Using insights from Resilience and Renewal by Robert S. Littlefield, we examine how Lions Clubs International adapted in real time—through grassroots action, middle leadership, and a mission that never stopped. This isn’t about the crisis. It’s about how you respond when control is gone

Welcome to this edition of The Curated Chapter.

Today’s episode looks at something every organization eventually faces—crisis. At some point, the plan stops working and what happens next reveals how leadership functions under pressure.

I don’t know how old you are, but one of the clearest examples of this comes from Johnson & Johnson and the Tylenol crisis in the early 1980s. If you weren’t around, here’s the short version. In 1982, several people died after taking cyanide-laced Tylenol capsules, triggering a nationwide panic. Johnson & Johnson responded by pulling millions of bottles off shelves, communicating transparently, and introducing tamper-proof packaging—setting the standard for modern crisis management.

Fast forward to the COVID-19 pandemic. Organizations everywhere were blindsided—most of them, if we’re being honest. But Lions Clubs International did something different.

Instead of shutting down, they adapted—rethinking how they communicate, how they lead, and how they serve…and they came out the other side more flexible, more responsive, and more resilient.

Robert S. Littlefield – Lions were like water around a rock the obstacle was the rock of covid and lions found a way around it to keep moving to keep serving and that’s the story of this book 

That is Robert S. Littlefield, author of the new book Resilience and Renewal: The Story of Lions International and the Crisis of COVID-19. Now, let me give you a little context because in full disclosure my father was a member of the Lions Club many years ago, but I never really understood the scale of it. There are over 49,000 Lions Clubs around the world, with approximately 1.4 million members across more than 200 countries and territories. 

This is a massive, global organization—and it exists for one reason: to serve people in need, wherever they are. So when a crisis shuts down the ability to serv. That’s not just disruptive, it’s potentially catastrophic. So why wasn’t it?

Robert S. Littlefield – Not only does it talk about lions but the way lions demonstrated resilience and these are skills that other organizations can benefit from. I really think that this is a blueprint for organizational learning and how to survive a major crisis as an organization because lions did it.

So how did they do it? Robert, a Lions Club member himself for over 40 years, interviewed 52 people ranging from international leaders down to the local club level to understand what actually worked. 

Robert S. Littlefield  – They were very self-disclosive in terms of you know we I talked about what did you think were the good things we did that our strengths and where were there some places where we maybe fell down or we didn’t do as well as we could have and they were honest in their reflections and so I shared all of that in the book. 

What he found was that the answer didn’t come from the top. W