During the 2008 worldwide financial meltdown, Rahm Emanuel famously said, “Never allow a crisis go to waste.” Last month on “This Week with George Stephanopoulos," the former Chicago mayor repeated the remark in reference to Covid-19 and added, “Start planning for the future.” By which he meant not the immediate future, but the future in which other unforeseeable crises will inevitably arrive. That’s good advice not only for policy makers but for entrepreneurs as well.
Startup leaders who systematically harvest the lessons of the present emergency, reflect on their meaning and codify them can create a crisis playbook that they can readily call on when the next calamity occurs. The next crisis may come without warning, but that doesn’t mean you have to be unprepared.
Startup leaders are typically no strangers to crises. They happen all the time when you’re trying to get a business off the ground—products fail, money dries up, giant companies bigfoot you, a downturn kills your market. But those fairly narrow problems pale in comparison to the scale and scope of the Covid-19 crisis—a worldwide indiscriminate killer of people and economies.
Consequently, the burdens of leadership for entrepreneurs have never been greater. They have had to simultaneously manage the health of their people and the health of their people. They’ve had to learn how to lead from home and how to chart a course toward survival.
By now, virtually all startup leaders have experienced a first wave of team health issues and have put in place a first phase of business survival mitigations: work from home processes, changes to the business model (such as offering home delivery or renting additional warehouse space), furloughs, and emergency loan applications. These changes and the responses have been stressful, chaotic, and often ineffective. The stress and chaos felt by startup leaders have been amplified by the often-haphazard actions and directives issued by unprepared and equally stressed local, state, and federal officials.
Even if some of your responses haven’t worked, they contain valuable lessons that you shouldn’t entrust to faulty memory. You’re sweating through one of the most difficult experiences you’re likely to face. Turn it into something valuable. Be ready for the next time, whether it’s a Covid-19 resurgence or some other unexpected business interruption—a fire, for example.
Air traffic controllers have checklists for every crisis any air traffic controller has ever experienced. They don’t flail around when a pilot radios in with an emergency. They pull out their checklists. You should be similarly prepared when something disastrous happens years—or maybe just months—down the road. Here’s how to start:
List what has made you happiest and the angriest. Your emotions are your best filter for identifying the most valuable things you’ve learned. Ask your team to write down their emotional peaks and troughs as well. The positive list might include things like getting a loan, welcoming back someone who was hospitalized, helping a furloughed employee find another job, or getting the hundredth take-out order that meant you could stay in business. Create a top-five ranking of the positives and negatives from your comprehensive lists. But remember, this is your list. It’s not a consensus document; it’s what you feel, aided with ideas from your team.
Ask yourself these questions about each item on your list of positives. What could you have done to create more of each type of positive occurrence? What could you have done to make those moments even more positive? What can you do to keep those moments from being destroyed or curtailed? You may have items on your list like, “I was happy when I got five minutes of peace.” Or, “I was very happy when my employee was released from the hospital.” These are triumphs, albeit small ones, and they indicate important things you want to put into place going forward. Rest, for example. Plan for peace and quiet for you and every member of the team. Clearly, you don’t want someone to get sick just so you can feel good when they recover, but listing that moment indicates how important it is for you and your team to celebrate recoveries from setbacks. Everyone’s lists will be different, as will everyone’s answers. But each thing on your list indicates some critical thought process that has made your own personal leadership style successful. And that’s what will help you persevere, because crises can cause you to forget who you are.
Answer these questions about what made you angriest: What triggered the anger? What could you have done to prevent the trigger from happening? List what you could have done from easiest to hardest—including fantasy preventions. Then answer what you could have done to mitigate, or soften, the effects leading up to your getting angry? You may list things like, “Seeing my bank balance go to zero.” Or, “My CFO missed the Zoom call with the bank because her three-year old had a melt-down.” You may fantasize about having a rich uncle who could lend you money, but the thought will lead you to think about where you can get standby money and how much money you want to keep in reserve in the future. It will also trigger you to think about how much you may have to raise prices to accumulate the reserve you consider critical.
Each item on the list will lead to practical mitigations, some of which you may want to start doing immediately.
Review your answers with your team. They’ll have more suggested mitigations and preparations. This is when they can add other highs and lows to consider mitigating in the future. This part of the process takes little time, and it immediately reduces stress by focusing your mind and the attention of your team on how to rebuild momentum. Repeat this exercise periodically as the crisis evolves it elicits new types of emotional highs and lows. Do not stop until everything is back to normal.
Create a crisis checklist. Once the crisis is over, turn the most important wisdom into a crisis checklist. Review your document and ask yourself what you would have done differently. Put all the ideas and reflections into three buckets: critical, important, and desirable. Critical considerations are those things that would affect the survival of your enterprise and your team. You will want to do everything possible to address them before any new crisis hits. Important items are the things you start doing as soon a new crisis appears. Desirable items are the nice-to-haves that you will institute if you find that you can.
Your list will be long, but the wisdom you’ve developed will transform you into the best prepared crisis leader your team has ever worked with. Given all the uncertainty involved in reopening economies, facing climate change, and bracing for political and social unrest, this simple exercise is well worth the effort.