Corporate crisis: can you really regain control?
- 29/09/2026
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A crisis sets two clocks running. The first measures how much time is left to contain the damage. The second, less visible, measures how much time is left to protect the company’s trajectory. Regaining control means managing both from day one.
When a crisis hits, everything pushes the company towards the same time horizon: the next few hours.
People must be protected, sites secured, customers answered, financial exposure assessed, legal obligations checked and public statements prepared. The urgency is legitimate. It sets the pace and forces decisions that cannot wait.
Yet while the company deals with the visible event, another crisis is already unfolding. Quieter, but no less consequential, it concerns what the company will still be able to do tomorrow: keep a strategic customer, defend its margins, reassure a lender, remain insurable, preserve access to a market, respond to emerging demand or prevent a competitor from settling permanently into the space that opened up.
These two timelines are not sequential. The second does not begin when the first ends. Both start at the same time.
That is exactly what makes a crisis so difficult to lead. A decision that is essential today may reduce the immediate damage, and in the same move, close off a critical option for tomorrow. Conversely, an apparently defensive expense can just as easily protect a contract, strengthen the company’s reputation or build a commercial position worth far more than its initial cost.
The question, then, is not simply: how do we get through the crisis? It is also: what position do we want to be in when we emerge from it?
That position is not determined only once the crisis has begun. It is prepared in advance by stress-testing the decision chain, identifying critical dependencies and deciding what the company must be able to protect, transform or pursue before urgency narrows its choices.
Two clocks start ticking on day one
Picture a mid-sized industrial company that discovers that a component used in one of its main product lines may be non-compliant. No harm has been established yet and testing is still under way. But several customers are already asking for assurances, a certification body is waiting for an explanation, and the supplier involved also supplies the company’s competitors.
The first clock demands decisions about which batches to hold, which customers to alert and what actions will keep the risk from getting worse.
The second clock already forces a longer view. Would a blanket suspension protect the brand, or simply push customers towards a competitor? Would early disclosure weaken the company’s negotiating position, or demonstrate a higher standard of reliability? Should the company merely replace the component, or use the situation to reduce a dependency, co-develop an alternative with a key customer, or even turn traceability into a competitive edge?
Waiting until the immediate danger has passed to ask these questions would be a mistake. By then, some of the answers will already have been supplied by day-to-day decisions, public commitments, customer reactions and, sometimes, competitors.
Research on organisational resilience confirms as much : a company’s response to adversity does not split neatly into a “before”, a “during” and an “after”. Anticipation, adaptation and transformation overlap.[1][2] In practice, this means the company’s future starts taking shape while it is still trying to stabilise the present.
Leadership has to run the emergency without letting the return to business as usual decide the future by default. All the more so because going back to the way things were is not always possible, and not always desirable.
When sound decisions add up to an incoherent strategy
In a crisis, each function sees a legitimate part of the problem.
Each function may be right in isolation. Sales grants a concession that reassures a key account but severely erodes margin. Legal avoids a premature admission but feeds distrust. Finance blocks expenditure that protects this month’s cash position but jeopardises a hard-won customer qualification. Communications promises a deadline the team cannot meet.
This is dangerous precisely because it does not look like indecision. Quite the opposite: the company is making decisions constantly. The problem is that it stacks up local answers without having chosen what they are collectively meant to make possible.
A crisis, then, is not just a pile-up of risks. It is a chain of decisions under pressure, made by interdependent people whose horizons, information and interests do not fully line up.
Under pressure, information no longer moves neutrally through the organisation. Unwelcome warnings travel less easily, each function protects its own ground, and the voice closest to the chief executive may carry more weight than the analysis that best serves the company. Regaining control also means preventing these dynamics from making the decision by default.
Regaining control does not mean solving everything at once. It means establishing an order in which decisions should be made.
Finding the keystone decision
In every crisis, there is one decision that governs a number of others. Let us call it the « keystone decision ».
A keystone decision is one whose delay leaves the other actors to decide by default.
For our industrial company, the keystone decision may not be: “Should we stop all deliveries?” A more consequential question might be: “What promise do we want to remain capable of keeping to our strategic customers over the next eight weeks?”
That decision orders the others. It sets the priority checks, the level of cash the company is prepared to commit, the relationship to build with the supplier, what to tell customers, the acceptable concessions and the alternative solutions worth exploring.
The keystone decision is not necessarily the most visible, the most urgent or the most expensive. It is the one that reduces fragmentation and prevents a series of local arbitrages from adding up into a strategy that no one actually chose.
To identify it, leadership can ask one simple question:
Which decision, if we delay it, will force other actors to choose independently of one another?
Then, look at what that decision sets in motion : which decisions depend on it, which actors will have to act differently, which options it will open or close, and which commitments will become hard to reverse.
This work replaces no one’s expertise. It gives that expertise a shared direction. Legal, finance, sales and communications do not stop protecting their own ground ; they can finally measure their recommendations against the path the company has chosen.
Deciding quickly is not the same as deciding once and for all
Urgency breeds two opposing instincts: postponing structural decisions until certainty is available, or making decisions final when they rest on very little information. Both can be costly.
Kathleen Eisenhardt’s work on strategic decision-making in fast-moving environments shows that speed does not simply come from cutting the analysis short. It depends, among other things, on real-time information, weighing several options at once and having a clear way to resolve disagreement.[3] A company decides faster when it structures its decision process more effectively, not when it stops thinking.
To run both clocks, then, each decision needs its tempo defined:
- Immediate, when action is required to prevent irreparable harm;
- Provisional, when the company must act now without pretending that the choice is final;
- Conditional, when it hinges on a piece of information, a threshold, or one or another actor’s response;
- Irreversible, when it commits the company’s reputation, capital, a contract or its market position for the long term.
A decision can be firm in execution and still remain open to revision by design. But the trigger for that review must be set at the outset: a test result, the response of three key customers, a cash threshold, a competitor’s entry or a regulatory deadline.
This discipline prevents a ten-day measure from creating a three-year dependency. It also protects a resource that is often underrated in a crisis: the ability to decide later, when better information is available. Real-options reasoning shows that the right – but not the obligation – to scale up, adjust or drop a commitment has economic value on its own.[4]
Costs are visible, protected value is not
This is where a common misunderstanding about the cost of crisis or risk management arises.
These costs appear in the accounts. The value they generate often appears in a scenario that never happened: the contract that was not lost, the margin that was not needlessly sacrificed, the dispute that did not spread into a commercial relationship, the funding that was not called into question, or the strategic option that remained open.
The asymmetry is striking. The spending is certain and measurable; the avoided destruction is counterfactual. The advisory fee, the cost of a safeguard or the investment required for an alternative solution are readily visible. Far less visible is the value of an intact customer relationship, better-negotiated insurance terms, a brand judged reliable or additional time secured from a partner.
This accounting blind spot encourages companies to confuse a cost center with an absence of economic contribution.
Yet crisis strategy creates value through three very concrete mechanisms:
The economic value of crisis strategy = value not destroyed + options preserved + opportunities made accessible.
This is not an accounting formula. It is a decision discipline.
Value not destroyed is the most immediate: preventing a disproportionate response from consuming more margin, trust or revenue than the crisis itself. Research on product recalls has shown that a company’s response strategy affects its financial value, and that maximising short-term profit may conflict with preserving that value.[5]
Preserved options are less visible, but just as important: retaining the ability to serve a market, renegotiate, change suppliers, test a solution or reinvest once uncertainty has receded.
Finally, some decisions make an opportunity accessible. A company that treats a strategic customer as a partner in solving the problem may deepen that relationship. Evidence of strong risk control may influence a tender, a financing negotiation or discussions with an insurer. A substitute solution may become a new commercial offering. A sector-wide crisis of confidence may favour the player able to provide the strongest assurance.
These outcomes are not the product of cosmetic communications. They arise from alignment between what the company decides, what it does and what it says. Communication does not create control; it makes that control visible.
A crisis does not magically create an opportunity; it changes the landscape
The claim that “every crisis is an opportunity” is both false and insensitive. Some crises leave only losses to be contained. And not every new possibility is worth pursuing.
A crisis does, however, objectively reshape the company’s ecosystem. Customers’ priorities change. Some capabilities become scarce. Competitors withdraw or weaken. Potential partners become available. Trust shifts. Buying criteria sometimes change more in a few weeks than in several years.
Acting on this new landscape may require the company to combine legal, commercial, insurance, information, strategic communications and governance levers. The aim is to influence the course of events before the company’s options begin to close.
The company consumed entirely by the first clock sees the damage. The one that also runs the second can see the value moving.
In our example, the opportunity is not about « cashing in » a compliance problem. It may emerge from the decision to build a more traceable, less dependent solution with two major customers. If that solution meets what has now become a priority market need, expenditure initially incurred to navigate the crisis may turn into a commercial advantage. But only if the company has the necessary capabilities, customers recognise the value and the expected return justifies the resources committed.
The opportunity, in other words, does not exist independently of the decision. It results from the way the company balances the immediate resumption of its activities with the development of capabilities that will remain valuable afterwards.
Reputation follows the same logic. Empirical research has found that a prior stock of trust built before an adverse event can cushion part of the negative market reaction.[6] Trust is therefore not peripheral in a crisis: it can buy time, reduce distrust and improve the quality of discussions with stakeholders. But it cannot simply be asserted. It requires evidence – consistent choices, transparency about uncertainty, promises kept and the ability to revise a decision when the facts change.
Six questions to ask before the next major decision
A crisis strategy does not require another cumbersome process. It requires the right questions to be introduced when a consequential decision begins to take shape.
Before the next major decision, the leadership team can bring its various areas of expertise together around six questions:
- What must we protect at all costs right now?
Identify the point at which further deterioration would make the crisis uncontrollable or the harm irreversible. - Which decision governs the others?
Identify the decision whose delay would leave each actor to make the choice alone within their own remit. - What will that decision make possible – or impossible – tomorrow?
Consider contracts, financing, reputation, market access, alliances, investment and negotiating power. - What value is each area of expertise trying to protect, and what might it sacrifice in the process?
This exposes risk transfers and contradictions between recommendations that may each appear sound in isolation. - What has the crisis changed in our environment?
Look at customer needs, competitors’ behaviour, partners’ availability, scarce capabilities, the balance of power and the basis on which trust is awarded. - What value could we preserve or create as a result of that change?
Above all, what concrete evidence would distinguish a genuine opportunity from a plausible-sounding hypothesis?
The answers should fit on a single page. They should help identify the keystone decision, the assumptions underpinning it, the value it protects, the options it closes, and the date or signal that will trigger a review.
The aim is not consensus. It is an explicit strategic choice. Everyone involved should understand not only what has been decided, but also what value the decision is intended to protect or build.
Regaining control means regaining command of the trajectory
A company in a crisis will never fully control the event, its customers’ reactions, an authority’s demands, a supplier’s choices or its competitors’ moves.
But it can regain control over three essential things: the sequence of its decisions, their tempo and the value they commit.
It does so when it no longer allows the first clock to erase the second; when a keystone decision gives the experts a shared direction; when it distinguishes what must be settled from what should stay open to revision; and when it judges each response not only by the damage it contains, but also by the position it makes possible.
This is where a cross-functional crisis strategy reveals its full strategic reach. It does more than prevent further loss. It protects the company’s economic assets, preserves its freedom to act and can open access to new sources of value.
When the company turns that experience into a lasting capability, it does more than preserve value. It emerges with stronger governance, more cohesive teams, greater trust among its stakeholders and a better position from which to face what comes next.
Getting through a crisis without letting it dictate the outcome does not mean pretending to control everything. It means refusing to let urgency decide, on its own, what the company will lose, preserve or become.
Sources and references
[1] Trenton A. Williams, Daniel A. Gruber, Kathleen M. Sutcliffe, Dean A. Shepherd and Eric Yanfei Zhao, “Organizational Response to Adversity: Fusing Crisis Management and Resilience Research Streams”, Academy of Management Annals, vol. 11, no. 2, 2017, pp. 733–769
[2] Elisa Conz and Giovanna Magnani, “A Dynamic Perspective on the Resilience of Firms: A Systematic Literature Review and a Framework for Future Research”, European Management Journal, vol. 38, no. 3, 2020, pp. 400–412
[3] Kathleen M. Eisenhardt, “Making Fast Strategic Decisions in High-Velocity Environments”, Academy of Management Journal, vol. 32, no. 3, 1989, pp. 543–576
[4] Rita Gunther McGrath, “A Real Options Logic for Initiating Technology Positioning Investments”, Academy of Management Review, vol. 22, no. 4, 1997, pp. 974–996
[5] Yubo Chen, Shankar Ganesan and Yong Liu, “Does a Firm’s Product-Recall Strategy Affect Its Financial Value? An Examination of Strategic Alternatives during Product-Harm Crises”, Journal of Marketing, vol. 73, no. 6, 2009, pp. 214–226
[6] Paul C. Godfrey, Craig B. Merrill and Jared M. Hansen, “The Relationship between Corporate Social Responsibility and Shareholder Value: An Empirical Test of the Risk Management Hypothesis”, Strategic Management Journal, vol. 30, no. 4, 2009, pp. 425–445