Many of us want to develop more interesting papers that come to grips with more important problems. How, for instance, should we go about studying a cluster of young women who developed cancer because they worked with inadequate protection against radioactive materials and later catalysed revolutionary changes in industrial hygiene (Clark, 1997)? How can we turn financial and ecological catastrophes into natural experiments to shed light upon the resilience of effective leaders and organizations? Such cases present exciting opportunities for study but also challenges to theory development and methodological rigor. The objective of this Professional Development Workshop (PDW) is to explore the opportunities as well as the challenges associated with studying unique events such as disasters, crises, and environmental accidents, and to bring like-minded scholars together to build community who are interested in exploring how to develop theoretically sound and methodologically rigorous research based on events which are without precedent and may remain without a future recurrence.