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Welcome to the no Bullshit Leadership Podcast. In a world where knowledge has become a commodity, this podcast is designed to give you something more access to the experience of a successful CEO who has already walked the path. So join your host, Martin Moore, who will unlock and bring to life your own leadership experiences and accelerate your journey to leadership excellence.

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Welcome to Moments with Marty, your short, sharp shot of leadership insight to help you to stay on track between our weekly episodes of the no Bullshit Leadership Podcast. One of our early podcast episodes focused on leading through a crisis. It was a time when the COVID 19 pandemic was in its very early stages and governments all over the world were showing us how woefully inept they are at making big decisions under pressure. A crisis generally has three distinguishing characteristics. It's largely unexpected, it presents a material and imminent threat, and it requires time critical decision making. Companies that are really good in a crisis are often poorly managed. In these businesses, crucial systems and assets seem to fail regularly, forcing the team to step up, working day and night to fix the problem. When the crisis is eventually averted, everyone breathes a sigh of relief and falls down in an exhausted heap. Then senior management swoops in to praise the team for their dedication and commitment. They make a huge deal about how great their people are, which only serves to reinforce the fact that nothing is valued more highly than the ability to handle a crisis. People become addicted to the adrenaline rush of the emergency, not to mention the kudos that's showered from above after the crisis is resolved. And once the panic subsides, everyone goes to sleep until the next crisis hits. They never see a crisis coming, and they never take proactive steps to avoid it. Short of pandemics and acts of God, the majority of crises are actually foreseeable. Now if you want to put this statement to the test, the next time you find yourself in a crisis, just take a look back on the events leading up to it and see if there's anything that could have been done to prevent it. More often than not, you're going to be able to see an escalating pattern that led to the crisis. In my experience, the best way to manage a crisis by far is to avoid it altogether. This takes a lot of boring proactive work, but well run businesses are proactive. There are four really worthwhile tools that you can use to allocate time, energy and resources to in advance. The first is risk management. Identifying and understanding risk is one of the most fundamental disciplines of business. What could go wrong? And if it does go wrong, how big a deal is it. Understanding the severity of each risk and working out how much effort to put into eliminating that risk is Management 101. The second tool is scenario planning. This is just about asking the what if? Questions. And it's fun because you get to use your imagination to invent a bunch of hypothetical scenarios and to visualize what you might do in each one. And for the really big threats, you can even use game theory to play out how different players might react in different scenarios. The third is business continuity planning. This is about putting systems and processes in place to deal with potential disruptions before they occur. For example, what will you do if your head office burns down or the protein powder you manufacture is contaminated, or you lose your systems to a cyber attack? Having proactive plans in place that help you recover swiftly can mean the difference between a blip on the radar and a fatal plane crash. And the fourth tool is root cause analysis. When there's a failure of any sort, particularly in the world of physical assets, it's easier to patch it up and to get production going again and then to relax. Unsurprisingly, the same failure mode is going to occur again soon enough. I was fanatical at about ensuring my teams will do the work beyond just fixing the symptoms. Once the operations are restored, go and work out what the root cause of the failure was. The incident isn't resolved until there's a plan to address the root cause. Having the resilience to lead through a crisis, be decisive in times of uncertainty, and to demonstrate grace under pressure is a core skill for senior leaders. But an even more critical skill is the will to do the things that are going to help you to avoid the crisis in the first place. If you want to go deeper on how to lead when the crisis does hit, have a listen to episode 82 of the no Bullshit Leadership podcast Leading Through Crisis. We'll leave a link in the show. Notes I really hope you enjoyed this moment and that it gives you that extra little spark to be a no Bullshit leader. It.