Never Waste a Crisis
Can you turn challenge into opportunity?
Never waste a crisis.
I first heard this phrase from LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman on a podcast; and it’s stayed with me.
In professional (and personal) life, crises are inevitable. Projects fail. Budgets get cut. Teams collapse. Markets shift. These situations shouldn’t surprise us, though of course they’re difficult and disruptive.
But we also shouldn’t waste them.
This doesn’t mean denying yourself the right to feel frustrated, disappointed, or angry about what’s happening. Those emotions are valid, and suppressing them often does more harm than good. What it means is asking yourself, once you’ve processed the immediate impact: What can I learn from this? How can I grow as a professional? How can I make this situation better than it would have been without intentional effort?
What Does “Not Wasting” Actually Look Like?
Consider a project that’s gone off the rails. Wasting this crisis means simply moving on to the next project, hoping it goes better. Not wasting it means conducting a thorough analysis: What were the early warning signs we missed? Which communication breakdowns led to misalignment? What processes need to change?
It means documenting lessons learned, not as a bureaucratic exercise, but as genuine knowledge capture. It means having honest conversations with your team about what went wrong and what you’ll do differently. It means updating your risk management approach, your stakeholder communication cadence, or your resource allocation strategy based on what you’ve discovered.
👋 No more Powerpoint(!)
Have you heard of the Amazon 6 Pager Memo? It’s what Jeff Bezos uses to keep his mega-company productive. But it works so well that I use it for project management. Thousands of others do too. If you want my personal Amazon 6 Pager Memo template you can find it here.
From Reaction to Response
The key question becomes: When do you transition from processing the crisis to learning from it? There’s no universal timeline, but a useful signal is when you find yourself able to discuss the situation with some emotional distance. When you can analyze it rather than just relive it, you are ready to do a deep dive.
Some crises are so severe that the only meaningful goal is stabilization. A major organizational restructuring, a sudden loss of key clients, or a critical system failure. In these moments, “not wasting the crisis” might mean nothing more than maintaining your professionalism, supporting your team, and preserving relationships.
The deeper learning can come later.
The Compounding Effect
Every professional setback contains information. Market feedback. Leadership lessons. Process improvements. Technical insights. Extract and apply these lessons. You won’t just recover from the crisis, you will become more capable than you were before.
Over a career, this compounds.
The professional who consistently turns setbacks into development opportunities builds judgment and resilience that can’t be acquired any other way.
So don’t waste a crisis. Don’t waste the opportunity to develop, to evolve, to become a more effective professional than you were before it arrived. The crisis itself may not be a choice, but what you learn from it always is.
Per usual, I'm behind on reading, so getting caught up here but "never waste a crisis" is something I come back to constantly in my work with leaders. The ones who grow the fastest aren't the ones who avoid hard situations, they're the ones who get curious about them faster than everyone else.
The compounding effect piece is real. I've watched leaders go through the same type of crisis two or three times because they never did the honest debrief the first time. They moved on, felt relieved, and missed everything the situation was trying to teach them.
The shift from reaction to response is where most people get stuck though. Processing the emotion is necessary, but some leaders camp out there and never make it to the learning. Do you see that happening?