Two hours before a launch event I’d spent four months planning, our main vendor called to say the shipment was stuck in customs and wouldn’t clear for at least ten days. Two hundred people were already on their way to a venue we’d rented for one afternoon. I want to tell you I handled it with calm, seasoned grace. I didn’t — I sat in a stairwell for six minutes doing nothing useful at all. What happened after that is the part worth writing down, because it wasn’t inspiration, it was a sequence.
Separate the fire from the smoke
The fire was: we had no product to show. The smoke was everything else — the embarrassment, the sunk cost of four months, the imagined conversations with my boss, the guests already en route. In a crisis your brain treats all of that as one undifferentiated emergency, and it isn’t. I wrote two lists on my phone in the stairwell: “true problem, happening right now” and “everything else.” The true problem list had one item. The everything-else list had eleven, and none of them needed solving in the next 90 minutes.
That single-item list is what let me stand up. You cannot solve eleven things at once, but almost anyone can solve one. 
The fix was smaller than the disaster felt
We didn’t have the product. We had photos, a prototype, and a designer who’d built the thing by hand three times over. So the event became a behind-the-scenes preview instead of a launch — the designer talked through the prototypes on stage, we announced ship dates with a discount for the wait, and the room, if anything, felt more like they’d been let in on something rather than sold something. We ended up with a longer waitlist than we’d projected for the original launch.
None of that was clever in the moment. It was the only option left once the actual product was off the table, and it worked better than the plan it replaced. That’s a pattern I’ve now seen enough times to trust: the backup plan you’re forced into is often more honest, and more memorable, than the polished version you’d rehearsed.
What to actually do in the first ten minutes
- Name the one true, time-bound problem on paper — not the feeling, the fact
- Ask what you still have, not what you lost — we still had a room, a designer, and a story
- Tell the people closest to the problem the truth immediately; the team found out before the guests did, and that ten minutes of honesty bought their best thinking
- Set a decision deadline shorter than feels comfortable — we gave ourselves 20 minutes to pick a direction, not 20 minutes to consider options forever
The lesson wasn’t resilience, it was structure
I don’t think I’m more resilient than I was before that afternoon. What changed is that I now have a stairwell routine — write the one true problem, write what’s still available, set a short deadline — and I’ve used some version of it four times since, including for a much smaller crisis (a caterer no-show for 15 people, which sounds trivial next to a product launch and did not feel trivial at 6 p.m. that day). The size of the disaster matters less than whether you have a way to shrink it down to one solvable thing. That’s the whole skill, and it’s learnable the boring way: by having gone through it once and written down what worked.
