Life Lessons From A Crisis Manager: John Leon (Transcript)

Read the full transcript of professional crisis manager John Leon’s talk titled “Life Lessons From A Crisis Manager” at TEDxSTU, July 8, 2025.

Listen to the audio version here:

JOHN LEON: Once upon a time, many years ago, in a galaxy far, far away, I was a 22-year-old. I distinctly remember that my life was one big, chaotic mess. I always seemed like I was in the midst of some crisis, but I couldn’t understand why. By the time I was 22, I was married, had children, had a mortgage I couldn’t afford, a full-time job that didn’t pay enough, and I was balancing two full-time schedules at school that I couldn’t afford, all in the hopes that one day I’d go to law school and become an attorney.

But like any 22-year-old that was struggling to find myself, asking questions to myself like, “Self, why can’t you get out of your own way? Why do you lack the necessary skills to deal with life’s daily setbacks?” Fast forward 30 years later, my daughter is here, she’s in law school, she’ll be an attorney soon, so I did that right. I survived, I’m still here, and I became a crisis manager, hoping to impart a little knowledge that can maybe help you in your personal lives deal with some of the challenges I struggled with.

What Makes a Professional Crisis Manager

So as I stated, I’m a professional crisis manager. I’ve been one for over 20 years. I help organizations deal with unexpected and disruptive events that threaten to harm their organizations. For this, I went to college, grad school, and even law school, all to hone my trade. I’ve been putting out your proverbial fire for over 20 years. See, that’s me right there.

I’ve represented professionals of all types and sorts, from executives to doctors and lawyers and every trade and craft in between. I’ve dealt with private and public companies, and I’ve handled problems both big and small. And it dawned on me one day, the only difference between us and professional crisis managers is a little formal education, some practical business experience, and a lot of fancy jargon.

Because in the end, we’re all crisis managers, whether as parents to growing children, as employees to difficult, demanding bosses, or simply as adults making our way in the world today, dealing with health or financial issues, or simply trying to pay tomorrow’s rent. So, it dawned on me, why don’t I take these applications and principles that I’ve developed or I’ve learned and apply them to our everyday personal lives?

Key Principles of Good Crisis Management

So now that you know what I do, what makes a good crisis manager? For starters, a good crisis manager understands that the problem is merely a challenge that we haven’t solved yet, and who amongst us doesn’t enjoy a good challenge? By simply reframing the problem as a challenge, as simplistic as it sounds, it tricks our brain into not focusing on the negative connotations with the word problem, but instead on solution finding.

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A good crisis manager also understands that the problem isn’t the problem. The problem is our reaction to the problem, and we’ll discuss that further.

The Critical Importance of Planning

A good crisis manager also is a good planner. We plan for every eventuality, however unlikely it may be, because we understand that failing to plan is planning to fail. There’s probably a lot of us here who know how hard it is to build and operate a business, or we know someone who has. We also know that the overwhelming majority of businesses today fail for a myriad of reasons, whether it’s undercapitalization, poor management, or just poor timing, but what you may or may not know is that one of the largest reasons that a company fails these days is a failure in planning and strategizing.

Let’s look at these numbers. 50% of businesses today spend no time on planning and strategizing. Think about that. The investment a person must make in human resources, financial capital, not to mention their time and expertise, and yet half of businesses don’t even bother planning for the future. For those that do plan, 85% spend one hour or less on planning and strategizing. Of the ones that do plan, 60 to 90% of them never even bother implementing their plans, and of those that do, 90% never launch successfully.

This is my long way of saying to you that the vast majority of companies today fail because they lack planning. This is analogous to our personal lives. How can we be healthy individuals, plan for long lives, or plan for that big promotion or college degree, or plan to build our own business when we don’t plan and strategize for it?

Trusting Your Gut and Speed Over Precision

Next, how many times have we overthought our problem, ignored our gut, only to reach the wrong decision? A good crisis manager relies on their gut because we value speed over precision in decision-making. We do this to avoid the dreaded paralysis by analysis. Now I don’t mean making hasty, poorly thought-out decisions. To the contrary, a good crisis manager makes quick, well-reasoned decisions while mitigating exposure to their client, and we do this because we understand that more is lost through indecision than wrong decision.

How do we know this? Well, we know that intuition is hardwired into our brains to protect us. It helps guide our decision-making process. Studies in psychology tell us that intuition is an actual, real thing. Intuition is the process whereby the brain takes use of subconscious past memories and combines them with external cues from the environment to help us reach a decision before our conscious mind even realizes it.

This is to say that intuition is our brain’s way of taking and identifying information from the outside world, analyzing probabilities and patterns to help us reach decisions before we even realize it. As a crisis manager, I’ve trained myself through past experience not to ignore my gut.

And I’m sure many people here have had experiences in the past when we ignored our gut and we lived to regret it.

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Reverse Engineering Solutions

Another thing I find useful as a crisis manager is reverse engineering. The fancy term of art we’ve coined is preemptive crisis management, but that’s not important. What is important is the concept. When I’m presented with a crisis, I reverse engineer a solution, which is to say I look at the worst possible outcome, try and avoid that, and work backwards towards a solution.

But why? Simply stated, for a couple of reasons. One, I’m able to eliminate the imminent threat. Whatever the big preoccupation, whatever the big threat is, I want to nullify if not mitigate it. By doing that, I can now work backwards towards a solution knowing that the bigger threat has been neutralized.

Secondly, it helps reduce anxiety levels. I’m sure all of us in our lives at one point have had a financial scare, a health scare, and you may remember that it was hard to think. Anxiety is a decreaser of IQ. It helps to know that when we’ve eliminated the worst case scenario, the anxiety levels go down and our thinking clears up. We’re able to make more objective, better decision making when the anxiety has been removed.

Taking Personal Ownership and Learning from Experience

A good crisis manager also takes personal ownership over a crisis and ultimate authority over the consequences of the decision making, good or bad. What does this mean? Essentially, the worst thing I can do as a crisis manager for my client or even in my personal life is not take personal ownership over whatever the problem is. If I can’t be honest with myself, I can’t look at a problem from an unbiased, unprejudiced mindset. I need to be honest and have objective thinking to be able to resolve my client’s worries. Ultimate responsibility simply means that whatever the outcome is, good or bad, I have to own it because that’s how I learn to be a better crisis manager in my professional life and in my personal life.

To do this, I teach my clients to learn from past experiences. No one amongst us is perfect. We all make mistakes. One of my greatest tools as a crisis manager is helping my clients learn from their past mistakes. We do this using what’s called a post-crisis audit, and I use it in my personal life.

Simply stated, whatever the challenge or the problem or the crisis I’ve now taken on, once it’s resolved, I work backwards and see with my client what worked and what didn’t. Whatever didn’t, we discuss why didn’t this work. To ignore the obvious is just to repeat the mistake again. Whatever did work, we institute a protocol, a plan, so that next time if a crisis rears its ugly head, we’re ready for it because we’ve learned from our past experiences what works and what doesn’t.

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As Winston Churchill once said, “Those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it.” Those are words that I, as a crisis manager in my personal and professional life, live by.

Case Study: The 1980s Cyanide Crisis

So let’s look at a case study. In the 1980s, you might have recalled that there was a rash of deaths in the Midwest due to cyanide-laced, over-the-counter pain-relieving drugs. Seven people died when they ingested these poisonous pills. What became of the event became a model for how to handle a crisis.

Essentially what happened was the manufacturer obviously took a big hit financially because there was a consumer-wide spread panic across the United States. Instead of ignoring it or passing the buck, they took ultimate responsibility and acted immediately as we’ve discussed.

What did they do? First, they pulled all their commercials from the airways, radio and television, and replaced them with public service announcements. They set up a 1-800 number for consumers to call with whatever concerns or questions they had. They sent out over half a million messages to healthcare providers, letting them know what the danger was.

In time, they recovered. They learned from their experience by issuing new, safer packaging for their pills. The public took notice, as did the corporate world. These guys didn’t shun away from their responsibility, and in time, they were rewarded by gaining their market share back and coming back stronger than ever.

This to me is the best example of how to handle a crisis in our personal lives. You act immediately, decisively, you don’t pass the buck, you don’t ignore it, you learn from it, and you come back bigger and stronger as they did.

Conclusion

So in conclusion, a crisis is an inevitable part of life, whether you’re a parent to growing children, whether you’re an employee to a demanding boss, or just an adult making their way in the world. So we plan and prepare for any challenge, we no longer refer to them as problems. So when and if a crisis does occur, we prevent or we mitigate the damage, using things like our intuition to identify potential warning signs before they occur. We reverse-engineer a solution, and then we repair and recover from the damage.

And most importantly, we learn and we reflect on what happened, so in the future, we can become better crisis managers for ourselves in our personal life and in our professional life. Thank you.