Most crisis responses are reactive. However, proactive crisis management can build resilience before the next big disruption hits.

Since the existence of humankind, crises have come and gone: Volcanoes, wars, pandemics.

In entrepreneurship, crises are omnipresent, too. A key employee leaves. A large customer doesn’t renew the contract. A lawsuit ties up management resources and liquidity.

Reactive Crisis Management

A leader’s core trait is managing crises if and when they occur. As crises often occur out of nothing, crisis management is inherently reactive.

An aircraft crash is the prototype of a crisis used in many crisis management trainings. The crisis organization of an airline is dormant most of the time, only to be activated in the event of a crash. Once activated, the crisis response team reacts to the crash, doing whatever is needed to take care of the victims and their relatives and to clean up the mess. As soon as the crisis event is handled, the end of the crisis is declared and everybody on the crisis response team goes back to their daily business.

Even for larger crises, it’s the same. Remember the COVID-19 pandemic, when entire countries went into lockdown? Governments and companies fielded crisis response teams, only to dissolve them once the lockdowns were over.

After most major wars, people are so fed up with war that they disarm. The best example is the almost complete disarmament of Europe between 1990 and 2022. People were done and over with WWII and the following Cold War.

Most humans don’t like crises. Whenever a crisis is over, they sigh in relief and try to forget the crisis as quickly as they can.

Proactive Crisis Management

Let’s try to look at crisis management from a proactive perspective. You don’t need to be a prepper to realize that many things can go wrong in our highly interconnected world.

Speaking for myself, I started to make my house energy self-sufficient more than 10 years ago. My friends said that I had power anxiety, and they wouldn’t understand why I invested time and money into solar panels, house batteries, and a building control system.

Then came winter 2022/2023. Russian gas deliveries to Western Europe came to a halt. Power dams were empty after a dry summer. And French nuclear power stations were down due to maintenance.

Many of my friends who laughed about my self-sufficient house called me. “Tom, what do I need to do now to install rooftop solar?” I told them that they wouldn’t have to do anything now, as they wouldn’t get any solar panels before at least the next summer.

As the requests for information about my self-sufficient house were so frequent, I compiled my thoughts and learnings in an eBook.

I also spent some time thinking about the best possible outcome of the energy crisis of 2022/2023: What if, in contrast to COVID-19, there would be some real change in behavior and politics after this crisis?

I put my thoughts into an article named “A Fictitious Review of the 2022 Energy Crisis, Seen From 2025”. Now it’s 2025, and what has stayed behind from the energy crisis in 2022?

Absolutely nothing.

The Anatomy of the Human Brain

Forgetting is an integral part of our survival: If we weren’t able to forget, we could not focus on what is relevant for survival, and as a consequence, we would die one way or the other.

Forgetting is great for everyday survival, but the chances for the long-term survival of our species would be better if we wouldn’t forget each crisis as soon as it is over.

But maybe it’s our own imperfections that make humankind so attractive if compared to a machine.