The Crisis Script: Afraid You'll Freeze

The fear

The Monday Morning Phone Call

The market drops six percent over a weekend and the phone rings at 7:14. But notice what the caller is actually afraid of, because it isn’t the money. It’s that his wife is watching, and his kids, and he’s the one who’s supposed to have the answer. The identity on the line isn’t wealthy man. It’s competent man, the one people rely on. That’s not a stupid fear. When the thing you vouched for falls, it’s your credibility falling with it.

The cost of having no script is that your cortisol does the thinking at exactly the moment the stakes are highest, and moving at the wrong moment costs something like ten times the discomfort of sitting still. You can’t pre-write the event. Nobody can. But you were never scripting the event. You were rehearsing the response. If your crisis mornings are exciting, the failure didn’t happen that morning. It happened in every calm meeting where nobody mentioned the storm.

The system

The Crisis Script: the rule you run

What you run

Pre-write the response to the crisis you know is coming, while you’re calm. Rehearse the behavior, not the event.

Run it this week

Name the crisis you can already see coming: the layoff, the diagnosis, the market drop, the conversation you keep not having. Now, while you’re calm and fear is quiet, draft your response, down to the first sentence you’ll say and the first thing you’ll do. Write it on paper. Keep it somewhere you can find in the dark.

The napkin

Napkin 12 of 21

The script: the calm response, written before the Monday that needs it.

If an idea does not fit on a napkin, it is probably not an idea yet. Redraw this one on your own.

The instrument

Run your own numbers, free

Calculator

Sequence of Returns

If your particular Monday is a crash the year you retire, this lets you watch how that one actually plays out before it happens.

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From the book

Chapter 12: The Monday Morning Phone Call

“Stay calm and follow the plan” sounds glib against a real catastrophe, and some catastrophes you genuinely can’t script; you can’t pre-write the event. But you were never scripting the event. You were rehearsing the response. The calm voice three years ago didn’t predict this particular Monday. It pre-decided who you’d be on any Monday like it. Preparation isn’t prophecy. It’s deciding, ahead of time, what kind of person shows up when the thing you couldn’t predict finally does. So write your own version of that call before you need it. Name the crisis you can already see coming, the layoff, the diagnosis, the AI memo, the conversation you keep not having, and draft the response now, while you’re calm and fear is quiet, down to the first sentence you’ll say and the first thing you’ll do. That is the Crisis Script. It won’t tell you what the storm will be. It will tell you who you are when it hits, which is the only part fear was ever going to take from you. Keep it somewhere you can find in the dark.

Who’s Steering?, paperback →About the book →

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If this one is steering you

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