Why Leadership Teams Disagree First, Not Last, in a Crisis
By Ann Marie van den Hurk, Mind The Gap Advisory
The uncomfortable truth about crisis response
Most crisis failures don’t start with the incident.
They start with disagreement.
Not shouting. Not chaos.
Quiet, rational disagreement among leaders who are all acting in good faith.
Security is focused on technical accuracy.
Legal is managing exposure.
Communications is watching the narrative move in real time.
Executives are waiting for certainty that never fully arrives.
No one is wrong.
But the organization still loses control.
Why misalignment shows up immediately
In the early minutes of a crisis, teams don’t diverge because they panic. They diverge because they are operating from different decision models.
Each function answers a different question:
Security asks: What do we know for sure?
Legal asks: What could this expose us to?
Communications asks: What will stakeholders believe if we say nothing?
Leadership asks: What happens if we act too early or too late?
Without a shared operating framework, these questions compete instead of converge.
The result is delay. And delay is not neutral.
Why waiting makes it worse
Many organizations assume alignment will emerge once more information arrives. In reality, more information often increases disagreement.
As signals multiply, so do interpretations.
Screenshots circulate.
Emails leak.
Partial narratives harden externally while leaders debate internally.
By the time consensus forms, the story has already moved on.
This is why organizations with highly capable teams still experience reputational damage. The failure isn’t competence. It’s coordination.
The myth of improvisation
Crisis response is often described as something leaders “rise to” in the moment.
That’s a comforting myth.
Under pressure, people revert to:
Their training
Their incentives
Their prior experience
If those are not aligned before an incident, they will not align during one.
You cannot improvise coherence.
What aligned organizations do differently
Organizations that move decisively share three characteristics:
A common decision sequence
Leaders agree in advance on how decisions are made when time is compressed.Predefined escalation thresholds
Teams know what triggers executive involvement and external communication.Practiced disagreement
They’ve stress-tested scenarios where functions disagree and resolved them before it mattered.
This doesn’t eliminate friction. It makes friction productive instead of paralyzing.
Why simulations matter here
This is where most tabletop exercises fail.
They test scenarios. They do not test decision alignment under pressure.
Effective simulations surface:
Where leaders hesitate
Where functions talk past each other
Where authority is unclear
Where messaging and action drift apart
Discovering those gaps in a controlled environment is uncomfortable. Discovering them in public is worse.
The real question leaders should ask
The question isn’t:
“Do we have a crisis plan?”
It’s:
“Do our leaders converge on decisions fast enough when signals are incomplete?”
If the answer is unclear, alignment is already a risk.
Quiet next step
Organizations that take readiness seriously don’t wait for certainty. They test their decision systems before they’re forced to use them.
That’s the difference between reacting to a crisis and containing one.
Ann Marie van den Hurk, MSc., APR is the founder of Mind The Gap Advisory and originator of the CrisisOS5™ Framework. She advises CISOs, General Counsel, Chief Risk Officers, and boards on decision authority and executive crisis readiness for the AI era. Based in Newport, Rhode Island — serving organizations in Providence, Boston, Portsmouth, Portland, and Hartford, and across New England, nationally, and globally. mindthegapcyber.com