Years ago, in a case study Marco Mancesti now uses in his own classes, a site director sat down to a pizzeria dinner with his wife and two children on an ordinary Tuesday. His phone rang. Every machine on site had stopped. Screens black.
He had two minutes to decide what to do, and what to say, before it tipped into pure improvisation..
That scenario keeps returning for two reasons. First, disruptions like this, whether technical failure, sabotage, or cyberattack, have become routine rather than exceptional. Second, most decision frameworks assume a luxury almost no one in a real crisis has: time to gather information, weigh options, consult.
In environments where speed genuinely matters, emergency response, boardrooms mid-crisis, decision-makers rarely optimise. They choose the first option that clears an acceptable threshold.
Marco Mancesti has spent two decades at the intersection of strategy, leadership, and organisational dynamics, working across a variety of sectors, including with emergency response teams. What this article proposes is a sequence: six steps, run in the order that keeps a decision-maker protecting what is actually at stake. A discipline for the moments when there is no time for anything else.