So hello everyone, and welcome to this session on mastering crisis management.We're gonna talk about what it takes to lead during crises, and I'm gonna speak to you from my experiences in various leadership roles in the tech industry and also from teaching about these topics. And I'm hoping that by sharing some of these lessons and these strategies, you can be even better prepared than I was to navigate crises as you take on various leadership roles throughout your career. I invite you to interact in the chat during my talk and to share your experiences, your perspective, and your questions. Does this look familiar to any of you? I imagine it does, known as the dreaded blue screen of death. You may have experienced it July of last year when your laptop wouldn't boot up, or you tried to check-in for a flight and struggled, or you couldn't access your bank account or ship a package.

Unfortunately, you weren't alone. Millions were stranded at airports watching these glowing blue screens in the departure boards. Hospitals canceled surgeries. 911 emergency services went offline. This was a true global business crisis. Now it wasn't a cyberattack. It wasn't a natural disaster. It was actually something far more basic and preventative. It was a faulty software update from CrowdStrike, and this was a company that we trusted to prevent these types of failures. This massive IT outage took down eight and a half million devices around the world, and the impact was huge. 10,000 flights were delayed or canceled. Businesses lost more than $5,400,000,000. Crowd strikes, stock dropped. But the real fallout wasn't just financial. It was broken trust, and that kind of damage is far harder to repair. So for today's discussion, I'm gonna define a crisis as an intensely difficult event that threatens a company's ability to operate effectively.

A crisis could be triggered by a a product failure, a data breach, a ransomware attack, an a natural disaster, a pandemic. These events often come fast. They hit hard, and they might linger for for days, weeks, months, or even longer. In fact, one in four businesses permanently shut down in the aftermath of a crisis. A crisis doesn't just test your systems. It it actually tests test your leadership and your culture. And that's why today, we're gonna talk about what are some ways that we all can be better prepared to mitigate the risks and to lead effectively through a crisis. So I'd I'd like to ask if you would type into the chat, share just one word on how you would describe a crisis that you or your team has faced. Anyone? Just one word. Destabilizing, unplanned, devastating. Panic. Okay. Scary. Overtime, frustrating. Alright. You keep you keep sharing.

I would love to tell you that you can prevent every crisis, but the truth is you can't. But that doesn't mean you're powerless. What you can do is adopt strategies that will help you reduce risks, lead through chaos, and come out stronger on the other side. And that's what today's about. I'm gonna share three practical strategies that can help you not just survive a crisis, but lead through it effectively. So strategy number one, break it before they do. In other words, break it before your users do, before your employees do, before your partners, your customers, your regulators, the press. And this strategy is all about uncovering hidden risks because you wanna find them before something breaks in the real world. So how do you do this? One way is to stress test your systems, but to do so safely in controlled conditions. So so here's an example.

This photo shows the James Webb Space Telescope undergoing environmental testing before it launched in 2021. So this telescope is the largest and most advanced in space, and it carries highly sensitive instruments. So NASA had to be sure that it could survive the extreme forces of liftoff and last for years under stressful environmental conditions. So they tested it under extreme noise, vibration, temperature swings. They pushed it well beyond the expected conditions in order to find out how it would hold up. That's the very same mindset that we need for crisis management, to push your systems beyond their expected limits before they go live. Here's one of my favorite tools and one of the most effective for identifying weak spots before they cause real problems. It's called a pre mortem.

And you can use this not just for a product launch, but for an initiative, a project, an activity, a transformation. The idea is simple. Before you go live, before you launch, before you're ready to begin your project, you assemble your team and you ask your team to imagine it's six or twelve months or some period in the future, and your project has failed spectacularly. And you ask the team to brainstorm all of the possible reasons why it failed. And you open your imagination as much as you can, brainstorming large number of ideas. You group them. You prioritize them. You discuss them. And then you identify some opportunities to prevent those potential negative outcomes. Simply by assembling your team and asking this question, it actually helps you surface blind spots that you might not otherwise have considered. And it allows you then to intervene ahead of time rather than have to deal with the damage control after the fact. Chaos engineering actually goes one step further.

You wanna find out what happens if your server goes offline? Pull the plug. You know, you wanna see how your team will survive without email? Turn it off. It's injecting chaos into your system. You don't do it recklessly. You do it in a controlled, responsible way, but you do it regularly. Netflix pioneered this approach. They did it after a very high profile outage on Christmas Eve in 2012. So families were sitting down to have a nice holiday family movie night, and their service went offline. Now it turned out the Netflix app was working just fine, but it couldn't function without a critical cloud service from Amazon Web Services that was no not available, and that was a very costly outage for Netflix. But instead of brushing that off as a one time glitch, Netflix committed to rethinking reliability altogether.

They built a tool they called Chaos Monkey that randomly shuts off different servers in production, and they use this to test if their systems could self heal without the users noticing. This is the essence of chaos engineering. You stop hoping that things won't break and you start designing for when they do. Alright. Strategy number two, Lead when others freeze. In a crisis, the uncertainty that often exists, particularly in the early moments of a crisis, it paralyzes. People freeze, confusion sets in, fear spreads. But it's in that moment that your team is watching, your stakeholders are listening. They need your presence, your leadership, your action. So I'd like in in the chat again, if you could type in, what is one quality that you value most in a leader during a crisis? So somebody you admire or you've seen excel in times of high stress. What is a quality that you value in a leader during a crisis?

Calmness, unflappable, quick decision making, intention, talking realistic strategy. Okay. Wonderful. Great. Keep them coming. I'm gonna highlight a few of the characteristics of what a exceptional leader will do in a crisis. And you can think about how you can apply some of this to your domain or the challenges you face. and foremost, it's so critical that a leader will provide direction even when you don't have complete information. Even partial clarity is better than silence. Communicate what you know, share what you don't, set clear priorities led by your values, provide guidance, support your teams. Number two, act with both urgency and integrity. Yes. Speed matters. There's a lot of pressure, and so does truth.

Many of us who are science based, we like to gather a lot of data before we can make a decision. So for sure, gather data, but be ready to make decisions even amid uncertainty, And then be ready to adapt quickly. Stay human. Stay humble. And finally, engage stakeholders. Your teams, your customers, your partners, your board, all of the key stakeholders in your orbit need to hear from you. And I'm not talking about just when you're the CEO or the CIO. You're a manager. You're a technical leader. You're a team member. It is time to communicate clearly, frequently, and through the right channels, to be transparent, to be accessible, and to remember to listen as much as you speak. Leadership during a crisis, it's it's not just about having the answers. It's being a source of clarity and trust when there is so much uncertainty.

Finally, strategy number three, emerge stronger. Every crisis is a bit of a test, but it's also a chance to learn, adapt, and evolve. The this is a bowl. It's called a kintsugi. It's a Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with gold. I I show you this because I think it's a symbol of so much of what we need to do during crisis management. Instead of hiding the cracks, it honors them. It makes the breakage part of the object's story, not something that's hidden or erased. And and this piece is not just whole again, but it's more beautiful, it's stronger, and it's more valuable than ever before. That's our goal in crisis management, not just to recover, but to emerge stronger. Root cause analysis.

This is not just to identify what broke, but it's to trace the problem back to the why it broke. And more importantly, what can we do to get underneath that and to prevent it or anything like it from happening again? So let let's take that CrowdStrike outage as an example. I'd ask the question, why did 8 and a half million devices go offline around the globe? I might answer that simply with because a faulty software update was deployed. Okay. But I'd ask again, why was the update faulty? Could answer that because the bug wasn't caught before release. So then I'd ask again, why wasn't that bug caught? Okay. Well, the the testing process didn't account for a failure mode and so on. And you keep asking. Every why takes you a bit deeper.

It takes you past that surface sim system towards the real systemic causes. Sometimes it's a technical issue. Often it's a process gap or a cultural problem. The point is you you don't stop at that answer. You keep digging. You keep asking why. You ask it again until you get to the root, and then you fix it at the source. When it's done right, the aftermath of a crisis is about learning from failure that can help you lead to a better solution and a stronger team. But that only happens if you make space for honest reflection, not blame. You need to have a culture of psychological safety that makes learning possible. People need to feel safe admitting mistakes or asking hard questions or challenging assumptions. It's not just having a a process.

It's about the culture being right so that this failure can fuel growth. So I wanna tell you one more story. This is one about how Samsung turned one of the biggest product recalls in history into an opportunity to strengthen long term trust. This product, the Galaxy Note seven, launched in August of twenty sixteen. This was a beautiful cutting edge device. The demand was high. Preorders broke all sorts of records. The early reviews were glowing. But just weeks after launch, reports started to surface about phones overheating, catching fire, even exploding. At Samsung paused their sales. They issued a voluntary recall, but the problems continued. There were more incidents. There were more fires. Videos went viral. Injuries were reported. Airlines banned the phones from their flights. By October, only two months after they had launched this beautiful new product, Samsung issued a full global recall, and they permanently discontinued the Galaxy Note seven.

In total, they had to recall more than 3,000,000 devices at a cost of over $5,300,000,000. It wiped out their mobile product profits for the quarter. But rather than deflect or downplay this crisis, they took full accountability. They conducted a thorough investigation. They found that the overheating the fires were caused by two distinct battery manufacturing defects. They launched a set of battery safety checks. They formed a battery advisory group. They even worked with the industry to improve battery safety. They didn't stop at technical fixes, though. They addressed cultural and process gaps that allowed this failure to happen in the place. They launched a marketing campaign featuring an emu that learns to fly and signal renewal, trust, optimism.

A year later, when their next product, the Galaxy Note eight Note eight launched, it had strong sales, profits hit record highs, Samsung's brand value increased, they owned the problem, they came back stronger. That's what great crisis management looks like. So to recap, I talked today about three strategies to navigate chaos and manage crises. break it before they do. lead when others freeze. And emerge stronger. These aren't just crisis strategies. They're actually tools that can help you lead in moments that matter most. Thank you. Thank you for your time today. And if you'd like to dive deeper, feel free to connect with me on on LinkedIn or to visit my website.