Most of the bad decisions I’ve watched leaders make in a crisis weren’t bad because the leader was stupid. They were bad because the leader was fast. The phone is ringing, the numbers are ugly, everyone is looking at you, and doing something feels like leadership. It usually isn’t.
I gave this talk for Equitable in April 2020, a few weeks into COVID, to a room of CEOs. Every one of them was running a company through something nobody had a playbook for. The pandemic was the crisis that week. It won’t be yours. A lost anchor client, a lawsuit, a key person walking out, a bank that suddenly wants to talk: the shape is always the same. Pressure, noise, and a demand for answers before you have any information. What follows is the one tool from that talk I still hand to operators, because it works on every version of the crisis.
The goal is quiet
Before the tool, the goal, because most leaders have the wrong one. In a crisis you don’t need to be fast. You need to be still, so you can run your company with intention, strength, and confidence while everyone around you is running on adrenaline.
Some of it is boring: sleep, food, exercise, a routine that looks like a normal week even when nothing is normal. I stopped sleeping in week one of my first real crisis, and I paid for it in month two. I learned that one the hard way in my twenties, and you can’t outwork a crisis any more than you can outwork scale.
Some of it is subtraction. The news is negative by design. Social media is a drain you have to overcome before you get to the actual work. Stop the noise. You’ll make better decisions with less input than with more of the wrong input.
And then the tool.
The Historian Test
The Historian Test is one question asked before any decision made under pressure: when this is over and someone writes the honest history of how I led through it, will I be proud of what I decided?
That’s it. Not “will this work.” Not “what will the board think Thursday.” Will I be proud of it when the dust settles and the facts are all in.
It sounds soft. It’s the hardest standard in the room. In a crisis you are making imperfect decisions from imperfect information. That’s fine. Nobody gets to wait for perfect information, and the leaders who try are the ones who freeze. But the historian doesn’t grade you on whether you had the facts. The historian grades you on what you did with the facts you had, and on how you treated people while you did it.
Run the test on the decision in front of you and three things happen fast.
First, the panic moves get exposed. The layoff announced by email on a Friday. The vendor you stiffed because you could. The customer you let slide because you were busy. None of those survive the question, and you knew it before you asked.
Second, the delays get honest. Some decisions need to be made today. Many don’t, and you only feel like they do because standing still hurts. The historian will never write “he waited three days to get a number he could trust” as a failure.
Third, it forces you to think past the storm. Every crisis ends. The people who were in the building when it was bad are the same people you’ll ask to build with you when it’s good. They’ll remember. They are the historians.
The companion: exercise restraint
The question that pairs with the Historian Test is even shorter. Does a decision need to be made?
That’s different from whether you can make one, or whether it would feel better to. Does it need to be made, now, with what I know? Because more time means more information, and in a crisis information is the one asset that gets cheaper every day. The deal that looked dead on Monday has three new facts by Thursday. In 2020, the cash forecast that made you sick in the morning had a government program attached to it by afternoon. Restraint is not passivity. It’s refusing to spend your one irreversible move on a problem you can’t see clearly yet.
Restraint does not mean silence, though, and this is where leaders get it wrong the other direction. You communicate more in a crisis, not less. You talk to all of your people, not just your direct reports. And you don’t wait until you have the answer, because you may not have it for weeks. What people need from you before the answer exists is three things: to feel heard, to feel safe, and to see a path forward. Transparency and honesty, delivered on a schedule, even when the content is “here’s what I know, here’s what I don’t, here’s when I’ll know more.” That’s communication that passes the Historian Test. Silence never does.
One more thing, and it’s the part most leaders skip because it feels like a luxury when the building is on fire. While you’re exercising restraint on the decisions that can wait, spend real time asking what this crisis just made possible. The leader who only manages the survival side comes out the other end alive and behind. That’s the Survive to Thrive idea, and it gets its own essay.
What this looks like on Monday
Take the hardest thing on your desk right now. Before you act, run the two questions in order.
Does this decision need to be made today? If not, set a date when it does, tell the people affected what you’re waiting for, and go get the information.
If it does, ask the historian. When this is written up honestly, will I be proud of this decision and of how I delivered it?
If the answer is yes, move. If it’s no, you already know what to change. And if you’re not sure, that’s the clearest signal of all: you don’t have enough quiet yet to decide. Go build some.
Imperfect decisions from imperfect information. That’s the job.
I gave this as a talk to a room of CEOs. If your room needs it, start at Speaking.