The Urge to Do Something
This summer, J.P. Morgan Private Bank put Crisis Engineering, Marina Nitze, Matthew Weaver and Mikey Dickerson’s field guide drawn from the HealthCare.gov rescue, on its annual reading list for clients. The book’s most useful observation is also its least comfortable: in a crisis, the leadership moves that feel most instinctive are often the ones that backfire.
The instinct has a name in every boardroom. It is called urgency. And it deserves a harder look than it usually gets.
Picture the Tuesday. At 7:04 a.m. your largest customer — 31% of ARR — sends the email. By 8:00 the executive channel is a flood. By 10:30 you have called an all-hands, frozen hiring, and asked the board for an emergency session. You did all of it before you knew why the customer left. None of it was stupid. All of it was fast. Some of it you will spend the next two quarters unwinding.
The first move is made to stop the feeling
A crisis injects a specific pain into the decision-maker: the pain of being exposed while uncertain. Action, any action, is an analgesic. Announcing the reorganization, firing the executive, cutting price, issuing the statement: each one brings immediate relief, because it converts intolerable not-knowing into visible doing.
That is precisely the problem. The first move in a crisis is usually made to relieve the decision-maker’s discomfort, not to improve the position. The two overlap far less than we assume.
Composite, drawn from recurring patterns: a software firm loses its flagship account on a Monday. By Friday the CEO has announced a restructuring and a 20% price cut “to defend the base.” The restructuring scatters the two engineers best placed to diagnose the churn. The price cut saves not one wavering account; three healthy renewals, six weeks out, take it as a starting position. Revenue impact of the original loss: $2.1M. Revenue impact of the response: roughly double. Nothing in the response was irrational. It was simply chosen for the feeling it relieved, in an order the situation never asked for.
The impolite version, stated plainly: most of what leaders call decisive action in week one of a crisis is self-medication with an org chart.
Diligence culture has no vocabulary for “wait”
Notice that the CEO in the composite could not have held still, even if holding still was correct. Every instrument around her rewards motion. Boards ask “what are we doing about it?” and never “what have we decided not to do yet, and on what evidence?” A company will produce a hundred-page diligence file for an acquisition and has no format at all for a decision to wait.
So waiting reads as negligence. “Not yet” sounds like “I don’t know.” The executive who says “we decide on day twelve, after the second data cut” sounds less leaderly than the one who acts on day one, even when day one’s action is wrong.
This is a vocabulary failure before it is a character failure. Waiting needs the same apparatus as acting: a stated reason, a review date, a defined trigger for moving earlier. Without that apparatus, waiting is invisible, and invisible decisions get punished regardless of whether they were right.
Reaction runs on the crisis’s clock. Response runs on yours.
Keep one distinction. Containment and strategy are different acts with different clocks. Contain immediately — isolate the breach, pause the launch, get accurate on cash. Nobody serious argues otherwise. But containment buys time precisely so that strategy doesn’t have to be made inside the panic that the bleeding produced.
The question that separates reaction from response is not “what should we do?” It is “when does this decision actually need to be made, and what will we know then that we don’t know now?” Sometimes the honest answer is: this week, and nothing. Fine. Act. But in most corporate crises the honest answer is that the irreversible moves can wait ten days, and the reversible ones aren’t the ones that matter. Ten days is an eternity to the anxious and nothing at all to the calendar.
This is the specific discipline my family’s method was built to supply. Qi Men Dun Jia, a classical Chinese decision-timing discipline held in my family for four generations, does not tell you whether your reorganization is smart — your own analysis covers that. It examines the structure of the moment you intend to move in: what the timing supports, what it resists, and what changes if the same decision is made six weeks later. The answer arrives in writing, as a Case File you can set on the table next to the board deck — evidence to be cross-examined, not a verdict. The same principle applied to deals rather than crises is here.
The urge to do something is real, and it will not go away. The discipline is to make the urge wait in line behind the question of when.
If you’re inside a hard week and every voice in the building is saying “now” — the timing question is the one we examine. Start an inquiry. New here? The Timing Compass is the short version.