Friday Forward - Planning Well - Crises always are hardest for those who fail to prepare.

This past weekend, a botched software update from the global cybersecurity provider, CrowdStrike, caused worldwide disruption to computer systems, affecting thousands of businesses and customers. The travel industry was arguably hit hardest, as thousands of flights were canceled, and many hotel guests were unable to check into their rooms.  

I happened to be staying at a hotel over the weekend of the incident, which struck as the hotel experienced its busiest weekend of the year. I was expecting chaos, having just read an article about a manager at another hotel who described needing to walk every guest to their room to open the door for them manually. However, from what I could tell, things seemed to be running pretty smoothly at our hotel during our time there.

As I checked out of my room on Saturday morning, I chatted with the hotel manager, who was on front desk duty at the time. I remarked that the hotel was lucky to not be impacted by the outages. However, the manager let me know they were affected—due to computer issues, they were unable to create any new room cardkeys for 24 hours.

Curious, I asked why there did not seem to be any noticeable disruptions to their operations. She replied that the hotel has good processes for manual check-ins and had also made an emergency book of master keys for each room. They’d made these preparations specifically in case of a power outage, IT failure, or similar debacle.

This experience was yet another reminder of a topic I have covered before in Friday Forward: crises often disproportionately impact the underprepared. In contrast, great leaders and managers try to anticipate potential problems before they occur and prepare their teams accordingly.

For example, any business that relies heavily on technology, without a manual backup process, is likely to be more severely impacted by disruptions. While some problems are unavoidable, the CrowdStrike incident demonstrates that with forethought, planning, and training, many issues can be mitigated.

A few other related concepts came to my mind as well after watching how businesses have tackled this crisis.

• You aren’t entitled to things going well. It’s almost always better to enter a situation with moderated expectations, which can be exceeded, rather than expecting everything to always go well. In fact, I’d argue that the high rates of anxiety and mental health issues we see today are largely due to misaligned expectations—people today expect things to be easy, but reality is very different. For many of our ancestors, just making it through the day was a win, but today, we often expect perfection in every experience.

• Focus on what you control, not what you don’t. From both the business and the customer side, the worst thing you can do in a crisis is fixate on things outside your control and lament your bad luck. When the Covid pandemic struck in 2020, almost every restaurant was impacted by a force out of their control. Some restaurants hunkered down and waited for things to get back to normal, even though they had no control over when normalcy would return. Others tried everything they could think of to respond to the crisis: building outdoor dining rooms, launching delivery services, and selling alcohol and ingredients. The restaurants that focused on things in their control fared much better during the crisis and are more likely to still be in business today.

• Fix your leaky roof when it’s sunny. This is an age-old lesson that many people and organizations repeatedly fail to learn. Too many leaders assume that everything will continue to go on as is—thus, they don’t use favorable circumstances as an opportunity to safeguard themselves, or their teams, against tougher times ahead.

• Being prepared creates luck. Everyone experiences both good and bad luck. The key difference is that while some people rely on good luck to solve their problems—and hope to avoid bad luck entirely—top performers use preparation to mitigate the impact of misfortune and position themselves to capitalize on opportunities. We can almost always improve our personal or business resilience to ensure the best possible response to both fortune and adversity.

Last week’s computer outage was a good reminder that, even in our increasingly digital world, we need to be able to operate in an analog way. Similarly, by anticipating what can go wrong, then planning and training for a crisis, we are much likely to come out of the other side stronger and more resilient.