Module Summary: Preparing for the Next Crisis

You have just about reached the end of this final course module on crisis preparation. How are you feeling about the readiness of your organization? Should it find itself in the midst of a major disruption or crisis? In your view, given all that you’ve learned, is your company light years away from being ready to handle a crisis? Or do you feel as though a few tweaks would get them to a pretty healthy state of readiness. Well, regardless of your answers to these questions, I hope that you’ve come to the same conclusion that I have with over 35 years of crisis leadership experience, that readiness isn’t optional, it’s really a matter of survival.

Every organization is going to find itself in some sort of crisis. Perhaps relatively minor on a global scale but monumental for a team within the company, or perhaps massive as we saw with BP and their Deepwater Horizon crisis. Big or small crises will appear. Our job as high-stakes leaders is to help our organization prepare for the inevitable. The lessons we covered in this module should have painted a pretty clear picture for you of not only how to create checklists, sent a team of crisis managers, but much more than that.

This module was ultimately about a collection of mechanisms designed to help your leaders look in the mirror and admit to themselves that we’re not really ready for the next crisis and now we have a much better sense of where and how we need to improve. If you’re like most organizations around the world, your leaders are not spending enough time thinking about the next organizational crisis, and really, it’s hard to blame them. In this VUCA world of ours, leaders are dealing with so many urgent things on a daily basis that sometimes it’s hard to consider the important. Crisis preparation is important, when they strike, they strike hard.

Now, you know enough to understand why being under-prepared can be catastrophic for an organization. This was the point of this module, and for that matter, this entire course. There are many steps that organizational leaders can take to be better prepared for the next crisis, but it takes a conscious effort to make these a priority. Hopefully, in this module, you learned a few different ways that you can help your leaders see them as such. As we all should have learned during the COVID-19 pandemic crisis, threats can appear from just about anywhere.

If we can build the muscle memory to view crisis readiness not as a luxury but as a hard requirement, our organizations and all of our stakeholders will benefit immensely from our decision. COVID-19 exposed to many areas of opportunity for improvement in our governmental and business processes, in the capability of our leaders to navigate the crisis environment and in our general readiness for a crisis. If you can use the approaches shared in this module to get your leaders to appreciate the gaps that exist between your current state of readiness and the ideal future state of readiness, consider you’re learning a great success. The path will be hard but also worth it if you can make it happen.

Keep pushing and creating opportunities for your leaders to discover for themselves. We can and should be much better prepared for our next crisis.