Is your leadership team ready for 72 hours offline?
👉 How ready is your leadership team for 72 hours offline in an emergency situation?
Only 40% of people in the #Netherlands have taken action to prepare for 72 hours without power, water or internet, according to the Dutch government. It made me wonder how many leadership teams have done the same for their companies, and whether what we learned back in 2020 would actually help.
When a technical fault took down the power grid in Spain and Portugal in April 2025, millions of people lost phone and internet coverage along with electricity. This is exactly the kind of scenario that households are now preparing for - which sits at the opposite end of what Covid challenged us to do (ie move everything online).
So Are There Any Learnings in How We Handled a Global Pandemic That We Can Use Here?
In March 2020, together with the entire leadership team at Yolt, we were trying to work out how to send a fully onsite company home until further notice. We had to move every meeting online and get people the equipment they needed to #work from home comfortably.
None of us had done anything like it before but our shared instinct was to put people first. Everyone got a few days to adjust to the new reality while we moved daily work online. After that, we dealt only with the most urgent priorities.
Many of the decisions that we made at that time, under extreme pressure and uncertainty, still hold true today. However, we never bothered to put together a crisis playbook to document our learnings and how we would deal with a similar situation in the future because, frankly, we never thought that such an unprecedented event would happen again.
Now, six years later, here we all are preparing for another type of crisis that will take our entire operations offline this time. If you ask me, the biggest learning from the pandemic is that we need to prepare well before an emergency actually happens.
Here's where I'd start planning:
People: How do you reach them when email and Slack are down?
Customers: What do they hear from you in the first 24 hours, and through which channel?
Systems: Which data and access must stay protected, and who can still get in when the usual tools fail?
Support: What do people get from you beyond work updates?
If your leadership team is unsure where to start with the crisis plan, you can find more info here: the Denk vooruit website for a free emergency playbook for businesses, and on the KVK website you will find an emergency scan for smaller companies.
🌟Sparking Leadership # 64: a weekly series on human-centered sustainable #leadership. Reach out if you want to become the best leader you can be or follow for more sparkling content. In the meantime, lead with spark! ✨️
