Leading Through a Crisis

Who it's for

Founders, chief executives, divisional and functional heads, public-sector and non-profit leaders, and the senior managers who step into an incident role, in a crisis now or preparing for the one that will come.

Output

• A scored report after every simulation, with the moment that earned each score and one recommended focus
• A cash runway stress test document from the leader's own numbers: three scenarios, the killer assumption and the signal that would show it is broken
• A trajectory across every attempt, and for the manager a Ren summary of each leader and a team report
• Scored against published frameworks: Boyd's OODA loop, Klein's recognition-primed decision-making, crisis communication discipline, Reinertsen's Cost of Delay, the Incident Command System, Coombs' situational crisis communication theory, high-stakes dialogue, care and challenge, the Minto pyramid principle and Aristotelian rhetoric

Program contents

1. Decision under uncertainty · Prioritisation and trade-offs — Crisis Decision · Prioritisation Pressure
2. Incident leadership — Crisis Management
3. Runway discipline — Cash Runway Stress Test
4. Hard conversations · Presenting under challenge — Difficult Conversation · Presentation Under Pressure

How the program works

A four-week program for leaders and senior managers who will hold a crisis for their organisation, assigned by a manager, chair, HR or L&D lead or facilitator, built on Renatus. Five simulation rooms and one document room · Four weeks, one or two rooms a week · Unlimited attempts · Ongoing thereafter.

The rooms

Why this program exists

A leader who holds a crisis decides with half the picture, tells people what will stop, answers for the money, and then faces the person and the room who stand to lose most. This program prepares them through simulation and one document. Ren builds each scene from the leader's real role, seniority and sector, plays every person in it, and takes the numbers for the runway test from what the leader states, so every room is new and moves with each decision.

What you'll achieve

1. Rehearsal of the five moments a crisis puts in front of a leader, as often as they want them: the decision, the call on what stops, the incident, the hard conversation and the hostile room
2. A scored report after every simulation: each dimension with the moment that earned its score, strengths, development areas, blind spots where the evidence shows them, and one recommended focus with a first step
3. A cash runway stress test document built from their own numbers: three scenarios, the killer assumption, the leading signal, and the actions, ready to put in front of a chair or a board
4. Unlimited attempts at every room, each a different scene for their current role, scored on the same dimensions and charted against every attempt before it

At a glance

Who it's for

Leaders and senior managers who will hold a crisis for their organisation, and those holding one now: founders, chief executives, divisional and functional heads, public-sector and non-profit leaders, and the senior managers who step into an incident role when it comes. It is assigned by their manager, their chair, an HR or L&D lead or a facilitator; the manager's lines are for whoever that is. Every room calibrates to role, seniority and sector, so one cohort can hold a chief executive and a first-time divisional head. It assumes participants know their business and their people. It rehearses the judgement a crisis asks of them, and scores it the same way every time.

Cadence

4 weeks

1

Decision under uncertainty · Prioritisation and trade-offs · Crisis Decision · Prioritisation Pressure · Read Escalation Decision and Communication; read Trade-off Recognition

2

Incident leadership · Crisis Management · Read Stakeholder Communication and Decision Quality; read the Ren summary across three rooms

3

Runway discipline · Cash Runway Stress Test · Read the Killer Assumption and the Actions; check the leading signal is in the calendar

4

Hard conversations · Presenting under challenge · Difficult Conversation · Presentation Under Pressure · Read Framing and Follow-through; read Question Response and Poise; read the team report; set the ongoing plan

Session by session