What happens to your beautiful structure when the fire starts?
You did the work. Roles are clear. Decisions are made bottom-up. People know what’s expected of them, and they step up without you asking.
Well done. Most founders never get this far.
But have you ever asked yourself what happens to all of that on the day things go wrong?
I found out the hard way
When I led Volt through a national crisis, we had 13K members, national media calling, and a situation that changed by the hour. We had to move fast, so we did. A small group made the decisions. We told people when we could, which was often after the fact.
Most of those decisions were defensible. But the problem was that nobody had agreed beforehand that this could happen. Nobody knew who would decide in a crisis, or about what, or for how long. So from our members’ side, it looked like leadership had simply grabbed the wheel.
What followed was distrust. Thousands of angry members. People who’d given us their evenings and weekends suddenly felt shut out of their own movement. On top of the crisis outside, we now had one inside. That second crisis cost us more energy than the first.
Why good structures break under pressure
Bottom-up is slow on purpose. You consult people, build support and bring them along. That’s what makes it strong.
A crisis doesn’t give you that time. Something threatens your people, your reputation or even your existence. You’re under time pressure, and you don’t have all the facts. Someone has to take charge, and that’s fine.
But when nothing was agreed, taking charge turns into arbitrariness. Who decided this? Why them? Why wasn’t I asked? Is it going to be like this from now on? People won’t be angry because you led. They’ll be angry because they didn’t see it coming and don’t know when it ends.
It’s okay to lead in a crisis. It’s not okay to improvise the rules.
That’s the whole point. You don’t need everyone’s approval in a crisis. You need people to recognise what’s happening.
When your volunteers already know “we’re in crisis mode, this team decides for now, and here’s when we hand it back”, nobody feels bypassed. They agreed to it themselves, when things were calm.
Then you can do what a crisis asks: move fast, without also putting out fires inside your own organisation.
What a good crisis agreement looks like
It doesn’t need to be a thick handbook. Afterwards, we wrote a proper crisis plan. These are the elements that matter most:
Anyone can raise the alarm, and a small team decides whether it’s a crisis. Not every storm is a crisis. A quick check within the hour stops you from overreacting and from sleeping through a real one. It also depends on if you have policy for it or not.
Some examples:
- A journalist calls you. Three women have filed complaints about one of your coordinators, and the story goes live tomorrow at 7 am. This is the first you’ve heard of it.
- Your biggest funder calls it quits on a Tuesday. Payroll is on Thursday, and you can’t make it.
- Two hours before your demonstration, the police warn you that a violent group is on its way. Five hundred of your people are already on the square.
- Your member database has been hacked. Names, addresses and phone numbers of 8,000 activists are online, and some of them are in danger if their involvement becomes public.
Some of these you can prepare for. You can agree on who talks to the press. You can have a safety plan for demonstrations.
But if you’re a growing movement, you won’t have everything in place. You can’t. No policy covers it. No team owns it. Nobody knows whose call it is. That’s exactly when arbitrariness creeps in. And it’s exactly why you need to agree on how you decide before you know what you’ll be deciding about.
The mandate is given, not taken. Your board, or whoever holds final responsibility, switches crisis mode on. They can also switch it off again. That one sentence changes how legitimate everything feels.
Everyone has a name and a backup. In a crisis, “someone should” means nobody does.
Crisis mode has an end. The goal is to get back to normal as fast as possible. Decisions are reviewed afterwards, openly.
Your own people are informed first, and often. Write this part first. Even in serious crisis plans, internal communication is usually the chapter that’s still empty. That’s exactly where trust breaks.
Do it now, while it’s quiet
The best moment to make a crisis plan is when you think you don’t need one. Once the fire has started, it’s too late to agree on who holds the hose.
I’ve turned everything I wish we’d had into one practical template. Go through it with your team, decide, and discuss so everyone understands what to do/who has the responsibility in times of crisis and where to go to if they notice something, and put it in a drawer. I hope you never need it.
