There are in fact two types of crises that are definitely not foreseeable and avoidable. And they're both people problems.

First is a crisis of perception. If a stakeholder or customer believes there's a crisis, there is a crisis. You might have already solved the technical problem, but sometimes proving that fact well enough to placate a skittish customer or skeptical internal auditor can take as much work as fixing the problem.

Second is a manufactured crisis. For reasons of their own -- personal advancement, competitive advantage, plain stupidity -- a stakeholder may be actively working to undermine success.

Both of these problems take strong leadership to address. You have to go beyond mere competence, and inspire confidence.

Greetings, While I do agree that there is a inverse correlation between competence and crisis, anticipating all potential crises and creating and allocating all the resources, Human, material and relational, is ludicrous! We can plan for various events, and how we handle a crisis certainly reflects on our leadership ability, but to think that because a crisis occurs it bad leadership is faulty logic.

We all have disaster recovery and contingency plans, but when the CEO goes into a coma from a car accident on his/her way to work in the morning, this is a crisis. How we respond ... with panic or calm reflection and swift action to avoid negative consequences, is how our abilities should be measured, not that we let the CEO get into a car accident.

Shit Happens. How we react, slip and fall, or make fertilizer, is how we separate Leaders from Bureaucrats! The belief that we can plan away all crises (Bad things) is just silly. But that is just my opinion. Thanks, Ray

Reminds me of a flyer that used to be commonplace around the office, until such things were banned: "A lack of planning on your part shall not be cause for an emergency on my part." Hearing Support staff especially liked this. (I was a land use planner in a CA county for over 28 years, until "retiring" in disgust about two months ago.)

Some of the crises of perception can even be treated with education. For Y2K, our 'backup' data entry procedure for these scannable forms (like SAT answer sheets where you fill in the bubble and scan them in) was for the guys to keep filling out the forms weekly and that we could scan in 3 months worth of data in a week.
The question they came back with was what would we do if the electricity was still out after 3 months? We said we'd probably be burning the forms for heat and that actually, the burning would probably start after about 5 weeks. They approved our plan. We were actually tempted to accompany our solution paper along with a request for a hundred million more paper forms just in case. ;-)