Home / The Leadership Library / Crisis and Change / Preparation
Preparation
Prepare roles and decision rights rather than scenarios. Continuity for small organizations, and running a tabletop that produces information rather than reassurance.
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01
The Crisis Roles Card
One page, printed, filled in before it is needed. Names and numbers, decision rights, notification order, and the first hour — the four things that fail when nobody assigned them.
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02
The Tabletop Exercise
An exercise that everyone passes has told you nothing. The design question is what would have to happen for this to surface a real gap, and most tabletops are built to avoid exactly that.
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03
Continuity Basics for Small Organizations
The realistic threat to an organization of thirty is not a disaster. It is one person being unavailable for three weeks, and that is entirely foreseeable and cheap to address.
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04
Crisis Roles and Decision Rights
Four roles, assigned by name while everyone is calm. The most common failure is the senior person absorbing all four and becoming the constraint on their own response.
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05
What Can Be Prepared and What Cannot
Scenarios are the wrong unit. Prepare the roles, the decision rights, and the first hour, because those are identical across crises and are what actually fails when one arrives.