Real emergencies become the occasion to pass a change already drafted, because the crisis gives it urgency, cooperation, and a forum that ordinary times never offered.
Borderline: whether this move is justified depends on the situation, and only the person in it can judge.
An example
A year earlier, the chief information security officer of a regional bank had proposed consolidating technology decision rights under her office, and lost. Then a ransomware attack shut down a competitor's online banking for four days, and the bank's own systems showed probing from the same group. At the executive committee she presented two papers. The first was the incident response: patching, monitoring, and a vendor review, approved in minutes. The second was last year's consolidation proposal, labeled as such and narrowed to security architecture decisions, with an eighteen-month sunset and a review by the board risk committee. She told the committee it was an old proposal and that the attack was why she was bringing it back now. The committee approved it, and the board risk committee ratified it the following month.
Why it works
Crisis lends the change the moral weight of the response, so supporting it looks better. It also looks easier: attention is focused, decision-makers are already in the room, and the case no longer competes with everything else on the agenda. Waiting looks worse, because the crisis has made the old risk concrete, and costlier, because delay now has a visible price. It requires someone with standing to speak for the response, a real outside signal, a change already drafted, and an audience that has not seen recent crisis exemptions go badly.
The thinking behind it
Irving L. Janis Janis's Victims of Groupthink (1972), drawn mainly from qualitative case studies of policy fiascoes, describes cohesive groups in which the drive for agreement overrides appraisal of alternatives, with symptoms including direct pressure on dissenters. A crisis produces that cohesion in an executive committee. Splitting the response from the change and adding an independent review keep the emergency's unity from carrying a decision it was never asked to weigh.
Daniel Kahneman In The Framing of Decisions and the Psychology of Choice (1981), Tversky and Kahneman showed that the same choice draws riskier preferences when framed as avoiding losses than when framed as securing gains. After a competitor's outage, standing still is framed as exposure to loss, and a bold consolidation looks like the way to avoid it. The frame is fair when the threat is real, which is why the clean form trims the change to what the emergency justifies.
Leon Festinger Festinger's A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance (1957) holds that holding a belief at odds with one's own action is uncomfortable, and that people often change the belief to fit what they have done. Executives who approve a change in an emergency tend to defend it afterward, since reversing it would mean admitting the decision was rushed. A sunset date and an after-action review let them revisit it without paying that cost.
When it fits
Crisis windows suit a leader whose earlier proposal addressed exactly the risk the emergency has exposed, and who has the standing to speak for the response. You need the proposal drafted and current, a real and visible emergency, and willingness to put the change through its normal approvals, even at speed.
How to use it well
Split the emergency response from the change you are bringing back, and present them as two decisions. Say openly that the change was proposed before and why the emergency makes it urgent now, since that candor is what makes the timing acceptable.
- Trim the change to what the emergency actually justifies.
- Attach a sunset date and a review by a body with independent standing.
- Keep every required approval, even if you compress the calendar.
- Support the response itself fully, so nobody can call the crisis a pretext.
What it costs and where it backfires
Colleagues who lost the earlier argument may feel ambushed, and if the crisis fades before approval, the change loses its cover. The move needs a real emergency and full disclosure. It turns into a different tactic when the crisis is exaggerated or invented, when approval steps are skipped in the name of urgency, or when people who ask for normal process are cast as obstructing the response.
When it is used on you
Ask for the emergency response and the policy change to be split into two decisions, with a sunset date and an after-action review on any new authority. Ask whether the change was proposed before, and have a gatekeeper with independent standing, such as the general counsel, rule on which steps can be skipped.