It reminds me that successful leaders and successful businesses can and should plan rigorously but prepare their organizations for "sudden change" or big deviations from the plan. To do that, we must build agility into our business model. This means hiring and elevating leaders who are calm under pressure and able to quickly digest data to make good, emergent decisions. This means cross-training talent to understand the roles of their peers so we can flexibly fill the responsibilities of our colleagues in a pinch. This means being good with cash management so that when we suddenly must fund an unexpected need, we have the ability to do it (say, for instance, an entire payroll when you're not generating ticket revenue due to COVID… hypothetically of course
). This means having a defined process for responding to crises where everyone knows who has decision rights on which topics, thereby enabling efficient and speedy decisions.