The First 60 Minutes of a Crisis Can Define the Next 60 Days
- Aws Alkhanjari
- 2 days ago
- 7 min read
When a major disruption occurs, leadership rarely has perfect information.
Yet decisions cannot wait.
Something has happened. The extent of the impact is still unclear. Different teams may be reporting different versions of events. Employees want direction. Customers may already be affected. Senior management wants answers.
And somewhere in the organization, someone has to decide what happens next.
This is why I believe the
first 60 minutes of a crisis are among the most important moments in organizational resilience.
Not because everything needs to be solved within an hour.
It won't be.
But because the decisions made—or not made—during that first hour can influence what happens over the next 60 days.
A Crisis Rarely Arrives With Complete Information
We tend to imagine crisis management as a structured sequence.
An incident occurs. The crisis team is activated. Information is gathered. Decisions are made. Communications are issued. Recovery begins.
Reality is usually much less orderly.
The first indication may be a phone call, a system alert, an employee message, a customer complaint or information from an external authority.
At that point, management may not know whether it is dealing with a relatively minor operational incident or the beginning of something much more serious.
That uncertainty creates one of the first challenges for leadership:
How do you make good decisions when you don't yet know everything?
Waiting for complete information may feel safe.
During a crisis, however, waiting can itself become a decision—and sometimes an expensive one.
The objective is not to make rushed decisions.
It is to have a structure that allows the organization to make disciplined decisions despite uncertainty.
Imagine It Is 10:00 Tomorrow Morning
Consider a simple scenario:
At 10:00 AM, a serious disruption affects one of your critical operations.
By 10:10, teams are trying to establish what happened.
By 10:20, different departments may already be taking action based on the information available to them.
By 10:30, employees, customers or suppliers may start asking questions.
By 10:45, senior management expects a clear assessment of the situation.
By 11:00, decisions may already have been made that will influence operational recovery, financial exposure, regulatory response and stakeholder confidence.
The organization has now been managing the crisis for one hour.
What happened during those 60 minutes?
Was the incident escalated quickly enough?
Did everyone know who was in charge?
Were the right people contacted?
Were critical operations identified?
Were assumptions separated from confirmed facts?
Did management communicate too early—or too late?
Did different departments communicate different messages?
Was somebody documenting the decisions being made?
These are not questions that should be answered for the first time during a crisis.
The First Question: What Has Actually Happened?
One of the biggest risks during the early stages of a crisis is acting on information that has not been verified.
Information travels quickly.
Accurate information often travels more slowly.
Someone hears that a system is unavailable and assumes there has been a cyberattack.
Someone sees an operational shutdown and assumes production will be unavailable for several days.
A customer hears about an incident and begins asking whether their information or services have been affected.
Within minutes, assumptions can start being repeated as facts.
Leadership therefore needs a disciplined way of separating three things:
What we know.
What we think we know.
What we still need to know.
That distinction sounds simple.
Under pressure, it is extremely important.
Good crisis management does not require leadership to have every answer immediately.
It requires leadership to know which information can be trusted enough to support the next decision.
Who Is Actually in Charge?
This sounds obvious until a real crisis occurs.
During normal operations, authority is usually clear.
During a crisis, however, normal organizational structures can become complicated very quickly.
Does the operational manager lead the response?
Does the CEO take control?
When does an incident become serious enough to activate the crisis management team?
Who has authority to suspend operations?
Who can approve emergency expenditure?
Who speaks to regulators?
Who approves external communications?
What happens if the designated crisis leader is unavailable?
If these questions require lengthy discussion during the incident, valuable time is already being lost.
A mature crisis management framework establishes roles, escalation thresholds and decision authority before they are needed.
The purpose is not to create bureaucracy.
It is exactly the opposite.
It is to remove unnecessary uncertainty when time matters most.
Protect What Matters First
Not everything can receive equal priority during a serious disruption.
Leadership needs to understand what must be protected first.
People will normally come first.
But immediately behind that may be critical operations, customers, information, infrastructure, assets, regulatory obligations, financial exposure and reputation.
This is where Business Continuity Management becomes particularly important.
An organization that has properly identified its critical activities should already understand:
which functions cannot tolerate prolonged disruption;
what resources those functions depend upon;
how long they can reasonably remain unavailable;
which suppliers or systems are critical;
what alternative arrangements exist; and
what should be recovered first.
A crisis is not the right time to discover your priorities. The work should already have been done.
Communication Can Become Part of the Crisis
Organizations naturally focus on resolving the operational problem. But communication can quickly become a second crisis if it is not managed properly.
Employees may receive different instructions from different managers.
Customers may hear about an incident before the organization has communicated with them.
Suppliers may not know whether they should continue operating.
Regulators may have notification requirements.
Senior stakeholders may receive information through informal channels.
And today, information—accurate or otherwise—can become public within minutes.
The temptation is either to communicate immediately or to say nothing until every fact is known.
Neither approach is always correct.
The better principle is:
Communicate what you know, acknowledge what you don't yet know, and avoid speculation.
Sometimes the most important early communication is simply:
We are aware of the situation. The appropriate response teams have been activated. We are assessing the impact and will provide further information when confirmed.
The exact wording will depend on the circumstances.
The principle does not.
Silence creates an information gap. And information gaps rarely remain empty for long.
THE CRISIS PLAN
IS NOT
THE CRISIS CAPABILITY.
A plan can be reviewed.
Capability must be tested.
Organizations can have excellent documentation.
A Business Continuity Plan.
A Crisis Management Plan.
Emergency response procedures.
Contact lists.
Escalation matrices.
Recovery strategies.
Communication templates.
All of these are valuable.
But there is an important distinction between having a plan and having the capability to execute it.
When the pressure arrives, can people actually use it?
Can the crisis team assemble quickly?
Are contact details current?
Does everyone understand their role?
Can management access the plan if normal systems are unavailable?
Are deputies identified for key positions?
Can decisions be made remotely?
Have recovery strategies actually been tested?
Can the organization operate if a critical supplier is unavailable?
Can communications be approved quickly enough?
A beautifully written crisis plan that has never been exercised provides limited assurance.
That is why I often return to the distinction between:
Documented preparedness and demonstrated preparedness.
The first can be reviewed.
The second has to be tested.
Why Exercises Matter
Nobody wants the first time their crisis team works together to be during a real crisis.
Exercises expose issues that documents often cannot.
A contact number is wrong.
A person listed in the plan left the organization six months ago.
Two executives both believe they have authority to make the same decision.
A critical system cannot actually be accessed from the alternate location.
A supplier dependency was overlooked.
The communications approval process takes too long.
An executive cannot access the crisis documents outside the corporate network.
These may appear to be small issues during an exercise.
During a real event, they can become significant obstacles.
Exercises also develop something that is difficult to capture in a procedure:
confidence.
People who have practiced making decisions together under simulated pressure are more likely to respond calmly and effectively when the situation is real.
So Why the Next 60 Days?
The title of this article deliberately connects 60 minutes with 60 days.
A crisis may begin suddenly, but its consequences can continue long after the immediate incident has ended.
A delayed escalation in the first hour may increase operational losses.
An unclear decision may extend downtime.
A poorly considered statement may create reputational consequences.
Failure to preserve information may complicate an investigation.
Delayed regulatory notification may create compliance issues.
Poor communication with employees may damage confidence internally.
Customers who feel ignored during the incident may reconsider the relationship weeks later.
This is why the early response matters so much.
The first hour does not determine everything.
But it can determine the direction in which everything begins to move.
Crisis Management Is Ultimately About Leadership
Technology matters.
Plans matter.
Processes matter.
Standards matter.
But crises eventually reach a point where somebody has to make a decision. That is why crisis management is fundamentally a leadership capability.
Strong crisis leaders do not necessarily have all the answers:
They establish priorities.
They ask the right questions.
They distinguish facts from assumptions.
They bring the right people into the room.
They understand when a decision can wait and when it cannot.
They communicate clearly.
And importantly, they are prepared to adjust decisions when better information becomes available.
This capability cannot be created during the crisis. It has to be developed beforehand.
Prepared in Advance. Decisive in the Moment.
The objective of crisis management is not to predict every event that could possibly affect an organization.
That would be impossible.
The objective is to create an organization capable of responding effectively when the event was not predicted.
That means having clear governance.
Understanding critical operations.
Defining escalation arrangements.
Preparing leaders.
Maintaining current plans.
Testing realistic scenarios.
Learning from exercises and actual incidents.
And creating a culture where people know when and how to escalate a problem.
Ultimately, organizational resilience is not demonstrated by how many plans an organization has.
It is demonstrated by what the organization can actually do when those plans are needed.
So I would leave leaders with one simple scenario.
Tomorrow morning, at exactly 10:00 AM, something significant disrupts one of your most critical operations.
Information is incomplete.
Customers are affected.
Employees are asking what to do.
Management needs answers.
The clock has started.
By 10:05, would your leadership team know who is in charge and what happens next?
Because the first 60 minutes may influence far more than the first hour.
They may define the next 60 days.
Is your organization prepared to respond—not just documented to respond?
Assist Plus Management Consultancy supports organizations in Business Continuity Management, Crisis Management, exercises, testing and organizational resilience.
About the Author
Aws Alkhanjari is the CEO of Assist Plus Management Consultancy (APMC), supporting organizations in strengthening business continuity, crisis management, organizational resilience and integrated management systems.
APMC works with organizations to move beyond documented preparedness and build practical capabilities that can be activated when they are needed most.
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