Navigate a Business Crisis

Strategy · 2–5 days · Advanced

The job

When revenue drops, disruption hits, or the market shifts underneath you, structure the response from diagnosis through scenario planning to a survival action plan.

What the sponsor gets

Each canvas and map from this playbook — SWOT Analysis, PESTLE Canvas, Pre-Mortem Canvas, Assumption Map, Experiment Canvas, OKR Canvas — exports as a PDF, or as PowerPoint on Pro, straight from the session, and the whole run exports as one PowerPoint for the sponsor. Nothing is redrawn.

The method

Gather data and align the leadership team
Pull together the key financial, operational, and market data. Run individual calls with each leader to understand their reading of the situation before bringing the group together.
Tip: Separate fact-finding from opinion-forming — you need accurate data before you can plan.
Run an honest strategic assessment
Create a SWOT canvas with the full leadership team. The crisis demands radical honesty about weaknesses and threats, not the sanitised version.
Tip: Start with threats and weaknesses — it sets the tone for candour rather than corporate optimism.
Understand the external forces
Create a PESTLE canvas to distinguish between forces you can influence and forces you must adapt to. This prevents the team from wasting energy fighting the unfightable.
Tip: Focus on which external factors are temporary (cyclical) vs permanent (structural) — the response differs.
Stress-test the worst case
Run a pre-mortem asking "It's 6 months from now and we've failed. What went wrong?" This surfaces risks that optimism bias hides.
Tip: Have people write their answers individually before sharing — it prevents anchoring on the first speaker.
Map your survival assumptions
Identify what must be true for the business to survive. Which assumptions are validated, which are just hope?
Tip: The most dangerous assumptions are the ones everyone agrees on without evidence.
Design survival experiments
Create Experiment Canvases for the top 3 assumptions. Each experiment should produce a clear signal within 2 weeks.
Tip: Time-box ruthlessly — in a crisis, speed of learning matters more than depth of analysis.
Build a 90-day survival plan
Translate experiments and immediate actions into OKRs. Weekly review cadence, not monthly.
Tip: Every OKR should have a leading indicator you can read within 7 days.

The canvases and maps

SWOT Analysis: Four quadrants split inside from outside and helpful from harmful, so strengths cannot hide threats and every point has to land somewhere.
PESTLE Canvas: Six fixed boxes — political, economic, social, technological, legal and environmental — so the room scans the whole outside world, not just the two forces it already worries about.
Pre-Mortem Canvas: It starts from failure — the project, how it failed, root causes, mitigations and early warnings — so people can voice doubts as foresight rather than dissent.
Assumption Map: Assumptions plotted by importance and certainty, so the leaps of faith that need testing first stand apart from the safe bets.
Experiment Canvas: Hypothesis, design, metrics and success criteria come before results and the decision, so the goalposts are written down before anyone sees the data.
OKR Canvas: One objective, three key results and the initiatives beneath them, so ambition and measurement sit on the same page and no initiative floats free of a result.