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New York • September 8 & 9, 2027
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The evening of Friday December 12, 2025, I got the call. Great Nonprofits had a critical donation-flow failure. Donations had been collected from donors all year but since August had not reached the charities. They’d only recently discovered it.
I knew what reputational risk this was. I also knew that there were tax implications since the calendar year was ending in a little over two weeks, with the holidays bearing down on top of it.
I started work that Monday (December 15th). I had no prior relationship with the team, no context on the systems, and multiple people who had holiday plans coming up, including a founder who was going out of the country shortly.
What followed was two weeks of crisis leadership under every possible external pressure: globally distributed teams across time zones, holiday schedules, multiple external vendors, and an organization that needed both a technical fix and a steady hand at the wheel.
This talk is about what actually works when you’re leading in crisis without the foundation most leaders expect to have or build first: relationships, context, and time.
I’ll walk through the specific leadership moves that made the difference: onboarding through people rather than documentation, clarifying ownership in a multi-party environment where everyone assumed someone else was responsible, separating signal from noise under time pressure, and keeping technical reality aligned with what leadership was communicating externally.
The incident was resolved before the end of the year. Donation flow was restored without additional disruption. And the organization came out the other side with greater clarity on its systems and its own resilience.
You don’t need a running start to lead well in a crisis. But you do need a different playbook.
Key takeaways
- Onboarding through people AND documentation accelerates trust and situational awareness faster than working in isolation.
- Clarifying ownership in multi-party environments is often the most critical unblocking move a crisis leader can make.
- Separating signal from noise under time pressure requires active filtering, not just faster analysis.
- Keeping technical reality and external communications aligned prevents the second crisis that often follows the first.
- In a crisis, you can’t wait to build relationships and trust. You have to build them at a speed that matches the urgency.
