How to Plan for a Crisis: Pre-Decisions That Work

TL;DR: Traditional crisis planning fails because it asks leaders to make critical decisions when their cognitive capacity is lowest. The solution is pre-decisions: making authority, coordination, and handoff decisions before pressure arrives, then testing them through behavioral rehearsal under realistic constraints.

Core Answer:

• Crisis plans fail at coordination handoffs between departments, not at the technical level

• Stress during crises causes decision fatigue, attention narrowing, and coordination collapse

• Pre-decisions establish clear authority boundaries and escalation paths before pressure arrives

• Behavioral rehearsal under realistic constraints surfaces coordination gaps that documentation conceals

• Implementation requires named owners, deadlines, and verification mechanisms for every identified gap

Why Traditional Crisis Planning Fails

Most organizations approach how to plan for a crisis by building comprehensive response plans, documenting procedures, and defining roles.

Then the crisis hits, and leaders freeze.

This happens not because they lack competence or commitment, but because they're trying to make critical decisions while their cortisol levels spike, their attention narrows, and twenty people are waiting for direction.

The problem is that traditional crisis planning asks people to make their most important decisions at the exact moment when their cognitive capacity is at its lowest.

Research on decision fatigue shows that judges' favorable rulings dropped from approximately 65% to nearly zero within each decision session, then returned abruptly to 65% after a break. Decision quality degrades predictably throughout the day.

Add time pressure, incomplete information, and reputational risk to that equation. You get coordination collapse.

Bottom Line: Documentation doesn't prevent coordination collapse because it doesn't account for how cognitive capacity degrades under pressure.

What Actually Breaks During a Crisis

Organizations spend months building incident response plans. They document procedures, define roles, establish communication protocols.

Then something goes wrong, and the plan falls apart at the first handoff between departments.

The technical team knows what needs to happen. Legal needs to review the language. Communications needs executive approval before sending anything external.

Meanwhile, customers are calling, regulators are asking questions, and the clock is running.

This isn't a documentation problem. You have the documentation.

This is a coordination problem that only surfaces under pressure.

The 2024 Cyber Storm exercise found that internal processes involving consultation with organizational leadership and legal counsel slowed down incident reporting timelines.

The 2024 wildfires in Portugal revealed coordination failures between different forces on the ground, causing delays in response time.

The pattern is consistent across contexts: When pressure arrives, coordination fragments at the boundaries between domains.

What This Means: Crisis failures happen at handoff points between departments, not within departments. Therefore, effective crisis planning must focus on cross-domain coordination, not just individual domain excellence.

How Stress Affects Crisis Decision-Making

Higher cortisol levels lead to lower decision quality and more experienced time pressure.

But here's what makes this particularly dangerous: increasing perceived time pressure speeds response times while worsening accuracy, cognitive inhibition, stress, and negative affect.

The stress persists even after the time pressure is relieved.

This means you're not just making worse decisions during the crisis. You're carrying cognitive debt forward into the recovery period when you need clear thinking most.

Studies show that under stress and time pressure, people experience decreases in detection of objects in peripheral vision.

The problem isn't just decreased breadth. It's failure to focus on the most appropriate information. Your attention narrows precisely when you need to see the full picture.

This is why the belief that people rise to the occasion during a crisis is dangerous.

The reality is that people fall back to their highest level of training. Individual and organizational performance falls below expected levels in most high-stress scenarios.

Key Insight: Because stress reduces cognitive capacity during and after crises, organizations cannot rely on in-the-moment decision-making. They must make critical decisions before pressure arrives.

How Pre-Decisions Create Operating Space During a Crisis

What Are Pre-Decisions?

Pre-decisions are specific authority and coordination decisions made before a crisis arrives.

In our work at SageSims, we've seen organizations transform their crisis response capacity not by improving their plans, but by making these decisions before pressure arrives.

Examples of pre-decisions include:

• Who has authority to approve external communications without escalation?

• Under what conditions can legal review happen in parallel rather than sequentially?

• Which stakeholders get notified immediately versus within four hours?

• What constitutes a threshold that triggers the crisis protocol?

These aren't planning questions. These are decision questions.

Most organizations avoid them because they surface uncomfortable truths about authority boundaries and competing institutional pressures.

Why Pre-Decisions Work

When you make these decisions in advance, you create operating space during the crisis itself.

Your team isn't debating who can authorize what. They're executing against pre-established decision architecture.

The shift is from "we have a plan" to "we have practiced together."

From individual domain excellence to demonstrated cross-domain coordination.

From assumption-based confidence to evidence-based capability.

The Mechanism: Pre-decisions work because they remove decision-making from the moment of highest cognitive load and place it in a calm environment where clear thinking is possible.

How to Implement Pre-Decisions in Your Organization

Step 1: Identify Coordination Handoff Points

When leaders ask how to plan for a crisis effectively, they're often looking for better documentation or more comprehensive scenarios.

But pre-decision isn't about predicting every scenario. You can't.

It's about identifying the decision points where coordination historically breaks down, then resolving the authority question before pressure arrives.

Start with the handoff points between departments. Where does work move from one domain to another?

• Technical to legal

• Legal to communications

• Communications to executive leadership

• Operations to customer support

Step 2: Define Decision Authority at Each Handoff

At each handoff, ask four questions:

1. What decision needs to be made here?

2. Who has authority to make it?

3. Under what conditions can they proceed without escalation?

4. What information do they need to make that decision confidently?

If you're ready to map these decision points in your organization, our Decision Rights Map Template gives you a structured framework to document authority boundaries before pressure arrives.

For coordination handoffs specifically, the Cross-Functional Handoff Map helps you identify exactly where friction occurs between departments.

Step 3: Test Through Behavioral Rehearsal

Then test it. Not through discussion. Through behavioral rehearsal under realistic constraint conditions.

Simulations and exercises help organizations build team muscle memory, identify gaps and strengths, and develop the behavioral patterns needed for coordinated response.

Navy SEAL teams conduct detailed rehearsals designed to be as realistic as possible, incorporating external assets that often present the greatest challenge and frequently lead to communication and coordination breakdowns.

The rehearsal surfaces what the documentation conceals.

You discover that legal needs three pieces of information you didn't know to provide. That communications can't move forward without a decision from someone who isn't in the room. That the escalation path you documented doesn't match how authority actually flows in your organization.

This is the core of what we do at SageSims. We introduce realistic pressure conditions that force latent coordination failures into visibility before they become actual crises.

Through facilitated behavioral rehearsal, we work with terminal accountability holders to test their decision architecture under constraint, surface the specific handoff points where coordination fragments, and convert those findings into implemented modifications with clear ownership.

The Process: Effective crisis planning requires identifying handoffs, defining authority, and testing coordination under realistic pressure before the crisis arrives.

Step 4: Close the Implementation Gap

Organizations complete crisis exercises, generate lessons learned documents, then return to normal operations without changing anything structural.

This is where most preparedness efforts fail. Not at the insight stage, but at the implementation stage.

Every coordination friction point you surface needs:

• A named owner who has authority to modify the architecture

• A specific change with a deadline

• A verification mechanism to confirm the change shipped

Every lesson learned needs to become a change shipped.

Otherwise you're conducting theater. You're simulating preparedness without building capability.

This is the bridge most organizations fail to cross. You've done the hard work of surfacing the gaps. Now you need a systematic way to track implementation and verify changes actually happened.

Our Decision Readiness Resources include frameworks for converting findings into accountable action with clear ownership.

Critical Point: Insight without implementation creates false confidence. Therefore, every identified gap must have an owner, a deadline, and verification before you can claim improved readiness.

Why Evidence-Based Readiness Matters

The Shift from Artifacts to Evidence

We've observed organizations shift from artifact-based confidence to evidence-based confidence.

From "we have a plan" to "we've demonstrated coordination under pressure."

This shift matters because it changes how leadership thinks about readiness.

You're no longer relying on the assumption that when something goes wrong, people will figure it out. You have behavioral evidence that specific individuals can coordinate effectively under specific constraint conditions.

That evidence doesn't guarantee perfect execution. But it dramatically increases the probability that coordination holds when pressure arrives.

The Cost of Unpreparedness

The cost of unpreparedness is measurable. Direct consequences include revenue loss, equipment damage, remediation costs, and legal fees.

Many companies struggled in recent years due to inadequate crisis management strategies, ineffective communication, and lack of agility in responding to emergencies.

On February 22, 2024, AT&T's mobile network went offline nationwide for more than twelve hours due to an equipment configuration error, blocking 92 million calls including 25,000 emergency 911 calls.

The cybersecurity incidents of 2024 revealed the prohibitive cost of neglecting proactive measures, from inadequate authentication mechanisms to unpatched vulnerabilities and insufficient incident response capabilities.

These weren't knowledge failures. These were coordination failures that became visible under pressure.

The Reality: Most crisis failures are coordination failures, not knowledge failures. Therefore, effective preparation must test and verify coordination capacity, not just document procedures.

What Proactive Crisis Planning Looks Like

The organizations that handle crises well aren't the ones with the most comprehensive plans.

They're the ones that made the hard decisions about authority, coordination, and tradeoffs before the crisis arrived.

They identified the questions that would need answers under pressure, then answered them in advance.

They practiced the handoffs that historically break down.

They built decision architecture that accounts for how authority actually flows in their organization, not how the org chart suggests it should flow.

Effective crisis management requires proactive planning, rapid adaptability, and coordinated execution. Successful crisis governance is built on preparedness, collaboration, data-driven decisions, and strong communication.

But preparedness isn't a document. It's a behavioral state you achieve through rehearsal that tests coordination under realistic constraint.

The Choice You Face

The question isn't whether you'll face a crisis. The question is whether you'll make your critical decisions before or during that crisis.

One approach gives you operating space, clear authority boundaries, and practiced coordination sequences.

The other gives you decision fatigue, cognitive narrowing, and coordination collapse at exactly the moment you can least afford it.

The Distinction: Reactive crisis planning creates documentation. Proactive crisis planning creates demonstrated capability through pre-decisions and behavioral rehearsal.

Where to Start When Planning for a Crisis

Find Your Coordination Friction Points

Look at your last incident or near-miss.

Not at what went wrong technically, but at where coordination hesitated.

• Where did handoffs slow down?

• Where did authority become unclear?

• Where did people wait for permission that should have been pre-authorized?

Those friction points are your starting position.

Define, Test, Implement, Verify

For each one, identify the decision that needs to be made and who should have authority to make it without escalation.

Document the conditions under which they can proceed. Specify what information they need to decide confidently.

Then test it. Not through a tabletop discussion, but through a scenario that introduces realistic time pressure and incomplete information.

Watch what happens at the handoff points. Surface the gaps. Assign specific owners to implement specific changes. Verify the changes shipped.

Repeat until coordination holds under pressure.

What to Expect

This isn't comfortable work.

You'll surface authority ambiguities that people have been avoiding. You'll expose coordination gaps that leadership assumed didn't exist. You'll force decisions about tradeoffs between speed and control, between delegation and oversight, between domain autonomy and institutional coordination.

But the alternative is making those decisions during the crisis, when your cognitive capacity is compromised, your attention is narrowed, and the cost of getting it wrong is highest.

The decisions you make before the crisis determine what happens during it. The question is whether you're willing to make them.

Your Starting Point: Begin with your last incident's coordination friction points, then systematically define authority, test under pressure, implement changes, and verify they shipped.

Your Next Step

You've identified the pattern. You recognize that documentation isn't preparation. You understand that coordination must be tested under pressure, not assumed during calm.

The path forward requires behavioral rehearsal that surfaces real coordination friction, pre-decisions that create operating space under pressure, and implementation discipline that converts insight into modified architecture.

At SageSims, we've guided organizations through this exact journey. We help you design scenarios that test your specific coordination architecture, facilitate the pressure simulations that expose where handoffs break down, and work alongside your team to implement the structural changes that prevent coordination collapse when it matters most.

We've built practical tools to support your readiness work, including the First 30 Minutes Runbook for establishing initial response protocols and the Vendor Failure Drill Kit for testing third-party dependency coordination.

Ready to move from assumption-based confidence to evidence-based capability? Book a readiness call with our team. We'll discuss your specific coordination challenges and map a path to demonstrated readiness.

Your organization's ability to coordinate under pressure isn't something you discover during a crisis. It's something you build, test, and verify before one arrives.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the main reason crisis plans fail?

Crisis plans fail primarily at coordination handoffs between departments, not at the technical level. When pressure arrives, coordination fragments at the boundaries between domains because authority becomes unclear, decision-making slows at handoffs, and teams haven't practiced together under realistic constraints.

What are pre-decisions and why do they matter?

Pre-decisions are specific authority and coordination decisions made before a crisis arrives. They matter because they remove critical decision-making from the moment of highest cognitive load and place it in a calm environment where clear thinking is possible. Pre-decisions establish who has authority to act, under what conditions, and with what information.

How is behavioral rehearsal different from tabletop exercises?

Behavioral rehearsal introduces realistic time pressure and incomplete information to test how coordination actually performs under constraint. Tabletop exercises typically involve discussion in calm conditions. Behavioral rehearsal surfaces coordination gaps that documentation conceals because it tests real decision-making and handoffs under pressure, not theoretical understanding.

What is the implementation gap and how do I avoid it?

The implementation gap is when organizations complete crisis exercises and generate lessons learned but return to normal operations without changing anything structural. You avoid it by ensuring every identified gap has a named owner with authority to modify the architecture, a specific change with a deadline, and a verification mechanism to confirm the change shipped.

How do I know if my organization is actually prepared for a crisis?

You have evidence-based readiness when you've demonstrated coordination under pressure, not just documented procedures. This means you've tested your decision architecture through behavioral rehearsal, surfaced and fixed coordination friction points, and verified that specific individuals can coordinate effectively under specific constraint conditions. If you can only point to plans and documentation, you have assumption-based confidence, not demonstrated capability.

What's the difference between reactive and proactive crisis planning?

Reactive crisis planning creates documentation and assumes people will figure out coordination during the crisis. Proactive crisis planning makes hard decisions about authority and coordination before pressure arrives, tests them through behavioral rehearsal, and builds demonstrated capability. One produces artifacts. The other produces evidence.

Where should I start if I want to improve our crisis readiness?

Start with your last incident or near-miss. Identify where coordination hesitated, where handoffs slowed down, and where authority became unclear. Those friction points are your starting position. For each one, define who has decision authority, under what conditions, and with what information. Then test it under realistic pressure, implement changes, and verify they shipped.

Why can't leaders just make good decisions during a crisis?

Because stress dramatically reduces cognitive capacity. Higher cortisol levels lead to lower decision quality, attention narrowing, and failure to focus on the most appropriate information. Time pressure speeds response times while worsening accuracy. The stress persists even after pressure is relieved, creating cognitive debt. People fall back to their highest level of training, not rise to the occasion.

Key Takeaways

• Crisis plans fail at coordination handoffs, not technical execution. Focus your preparation on cross-domain coordination and authority boundaries, not just individual department procedures.

• Stress destroys decision-making capacity when you need it most. Make critical decisions about authority, escalation, and coordination before the crisis arrives, not during it.

• Pre-decisions create operating space under pressure. When teams know who can authorize what and under what conditions, they execute instead of debating.

• Behavioral rehearsal surfaces what documentation conceals. Test your coordination architecture under realistic time pressure and incomplete information to discover where it actually breaks.

• Implementation is where most preparedness efforts fail. Every identified gap needs a named owner, a specific change with a deadline, and verification that the change shipped.

• Evidence-based readiness beats artifact-based confidence. Demonstrated coordination under pressure provides real capability. Documentation without testing provides false confidence.

• Start with your last incident's friction points. Where coordination hesitated, where handoffs slowed, and where authority became unclear are your roadmap for improvement.