Complexity in leadership: Australia’s response to the floating crisis – lessons not learnt

Abstract

ABSTRACT When Coronavirus boarded the Carnival cruise ship Ruby Princess in 2020, Australia’s leaders and the maritime industry responded with technical fixes to the most complex adaptive challenge ever to face Australian Federal and State authorities. As they struggled to make sense of the evolving pandemic, a similar situation had unfolded in the Northern Hemisphere port of Yokohama Japan, where Japanese authorities had already responded to another infected Carnival cruise ship, the Diamond Princess. All eyes should have been on the response to the Diamond Princess, and especially on the lessons learnt. In navigating complex chaotic environments, leaders need to make sense, probe and find a course of action suitable to meet the needs of a concerned community. This paper explores the evolving maritime pandemic and how Australia’s leaders attempted to navigate the challenge and the opportunity lost in experimenting to make progress against the adaptive leadership challenge, and why meta-leadership could have been exercised in response to these types of crises.