Lessons from Crisis

Posted 2026-04-08

The preceding posts assume that project members have time to prepare for closure, but reality is rarely that accommodating. When closure arrives, the question is usually not how to execute a plan but how to act usefully in its absence. Crisis response research has studied exactly this situation across many domains, and its findings offer practical guidance for project participants who have no script to follow.

Recognition-Primed Decision Making

When people describe expert decision-making they tend to imagine a deliberate weighing of options, but Klein1998 tells a different story. Under time pressure, experts do not compare options: they recognize a situation as an instance of a familiar type and act on the first workable course of action that comes to mind. Klein called this recognition-primed decision making because the decision is primed by experience, not constructed from first principles.

The implication for project teams caught in unplanned closure is that the experience they have dealing with emergencies in other domains is more actionable than they realize. Asking “has anyone seen something like this before?” is not a distraction: it is a direct way to activate usable tacit knowledge under pressure.

Psychological First Aid

Hobfoll2007 identified five empirically-supported intervention principles that should guide intervention and prevention efforts in the early stages of disasters: promoting a sense of safety, calming, self-efficacy and collective efficacy, connectedness, and hope. These were distilled from decades of disaster mental health research and became the basis of the WHO’s Psychological First Aid field guide WHO2026. The practical translation for project teams is that the first conversations after an unplanned closure announcement should not be about logistics. Instead, project leaders should confirm that people are not in immediate danger, lower the emotional temperature by acknowledging what has happened, remind people that they have handled difficult things before, connect people with one another rather than leaving them to absorb the news alone, and identify whatever is genuinely uncertain versus irreversibly decided.

Attention Narrowing and the Value of Lists

Attention narrows when people are under acute stress. Easterbrook1959 research showed that this reduces the range of cues a person notices, and subsequent work has confirmed that cognitive stress specifically impairs the ability to hold multiple competing priorities in mind simultaneously Starcke2012. The practical effect for a team facing project closure is that they will focus intensely on the most visible problem in front of them, such securing the code repository or notifying funders, while entirely failing to think of categories of action that would have been obvious under calmer circumstances. This is not incompetence: it is a predictable feature of how the brain responds to pressure.

Similarly, Gawande2009 found that the most common failures in surgery were not failures of skill but failures to perform steps the surgeon knew needed to be done. The intervention that worked was not additional training but creating a checklist that prevented the surgeon’s attention from being displaced by the immediate demands of the situation. The same principle applies directly to unplanned project closure. Spend the first few minutes of the crisis writing down every category of thing that must be addressed (e.g., access credentials, data backups, stakeholder notifications, community communication, legal obligations) before attempting to resolve any of them. Teams that do this will cover far more ground than ones that begins triaging or acting immediately. The list does not need to be complete or correctly ordered: it just needs to exist, so that work displaced by urgent action can be recovered rather than forgotten.

Convergence and Emergent Groups

Foundational research on disaster response shows that people converge on a crisis site without being told to Fritz1957. Dynes1970 extended this to create a typology of groups that form in emergencies:

established organizations following their routines
organizations that extend their routines to cover the new situation
ad hoc groups that form specifically to respond
emergent groups that have no prior existence at all

In software and research projects, community members who have no formal role often step forward during unplanned closures: one person maintains an unofficial mirror, another documents the shutdown in a public post, while a third starts an email thread for those affected. Project leads should recognize this convergence as a resource rather than a complication and find ways to coordinate with it rather than ignoring or suppressing it. The people converging are doing so because the project mattered to them, and they are likely to carry it forward if they are given the minimum viable information to do so.

Street-Level Discretion

Lipsky1980 found that frontline workers under pressure routinely depart from formal rules when resources are insufficient to apply them as written. They do not do this casually; rather, they do it because applying the rule mechanically would produce worse outcomes than exercising discretion. This is called street-level bureaucracy: the real policy of an organization is made not in headquarters but in the moment-to-moment decisions of its frontline workers.

During unplanned closure, the formal procedures for data preservation, access management, or stakeholder notification are often inapplicable because there is not enough time, the people responsible are unavailable, or the infrastructure has already been shut down. In this situation, the people present should not wait for authorization they cannot obtain before taking actions they can see are necessary. Copying data, setting up a forwarding address, or sending a brief public notice are all within the discretion of the people present. Waiting for formal approval when formal approval is not available is itself a decision, and usually a worse one.

Crisis Communication Without a Playbook

Coombs2019 studied how organizations respond to crises they did not anticipate and identified three core communication errors:

Silence: saying nothing while affected stakeholders fill the vacuum with rumour.
Denial: asserting that the crisis is not as serious as it appears.
Diminishment: acknowledging the crisis but minimizing its severity.

All three increase reputational damage and community harm. The research consistently shows that rapid, honest, minimal communication is better, even when (or especially when) the organization does not yet know what it will do next. A single paragraph in the project’s primary channel saying “Here is what we know, here is what we do not yet know, and here is when we expect to have more information” is not a plan, but can prevent the harms of silence.

Emotion-Focused Coping

Lazarus1984 distinguishes two broad categories of coping: problem-focused coping, which addresses the situation itself, and emotion-focused coping, which addresses the person’s internal response to the situation. Their research shows that when people perceive a stressor as controllable, they adopt problem-focused strategies; when they perceive it as uncontrollable, they adopt emotion-focused ones.

Unplanned project closure typically combines both. As a consequence, team members will respond to the same event differently depending on whether they feel any agency over it, and both responses are appropriate in their own domain. The person who immediately starts triaging data is not more competent than the person who needs an hour to absorb what has happened: they are applying different coping modes to the same situation. Managing an unplanned closure well means making space for both responses simultaneously. Tasks that require immediate action should be handled by whoever is in a problem-focused state. Tasks that require social coordination should not wait until the logistics are resolved, because people who feel unacknowledged withdraw from the collective effort. The two streams of work need to run in parallel.

Bibliography

Coombs2019: W. Timothy Coombs: Ongoing Crisis Communication: Planning, Managing, and Responding (6th ed.). SAGE Publications, 2021, 978-1071816646.
Easterbrook1959: J.A. Easterbrook: “The Effect of Emotion on Cue Utilization and the Organization of Behavior.” Psychological Review, 66(3), 1959, 10.1037/h0047707.
Dynes1970: Russell R. Dynes: Organized Behavior in Disaster. D.C. Heath, 1970.
Fritz1957: Charles E. Fritz and J.H. Mathewson: Convergence Behavior in Disasters: A Problem in Social Control. National Academy of Sciences / National Research Council, 1957.
Hobfoll2007: Stevan E. Hobfoll, Patricia Watson, Carl C. Bell, Richard A. Bryant, Melissa J. Brymer, Matthew J. Friedman, Merle Friedman, Berthold P.R. Gersons, Joop T.V.M. de Jong, Christopher M. Layne, Shaul Maguen, Yuval Neria, Ann E. Norwood, Robert S. Pynoos, Dori Reissman, Josef I. Ruzek, Arieh Y. Shalev, Zahava Solomon, Alan M. Steinberg, and Robert J. Ursano: “Five Essential Elements of Immediate and Mid-Term Mass Trauma Intervention: Empirical Evidence.” Psychiatry: Interpersonal and Biological Processes, 70(4), 2007, 10.1521/psyc.2007.70.4.283.
Gawande2009: Atul Gawande: The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right. Metropolitan Books, 2009, 978-0805091748.
Klein1998: Gary Klein: Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions. MIT Press, 1998, 978-0262611466.
Lazarus1984: Richard S. Lazarus and Susan Folkman: Stress, Appraisal, and Coping. Springer, 1984, 978-0826141910.
Lipsky1980: Michael Lipsky: Street-Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of the Individual in Public Services. Russell Sage Foundation, 1980, 978-0871545268.
Starcke2012: Katja Starcke and Matthias Brand: “Decision Making Under Stress: A Selective Review.” Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews, 36(4), 2012, 10.1016/j.neubiorev.2012.02.003.
WHO2026: World Health Organization: “Psychological first aid: Facilitator’s manual for orienting field workers.” https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/psychological-first-aid, 2013, viewed 2026-04-08.