Silence After a Miss Fills With Assumptions Worse Than Reality

The instinct when something breaks is to downplay it, buy a little time, let things settle… and that's almost exactly the opposite of what your team needs from you in that moment.

Scott Galloway has a crisis framework I keep coming back to, and it's three rules. Communicate regularly, be visible, be present. Acknowledge the issue plainly, because people don't like mistakes but they hate it more when you refuse to name them. And over-correct: do the most radical thing available to fix it, because the cost of overshooting is tiny next to the cost of doing just enough. He's talking about PR and big public crises. I think it maps almost directly onto something we deal with constantly in product and engineering… managing up when things go wrong.

So here's what it looks like for us. When there's an issue, get in front of your manager and your stakeholders early. Silence creates a vacuum, the vacuum fills with assumptions, and the assumptions are almost always worse than reality. People write their own narrative when you don't hand them one. Then own it completely. No softening, no "we're mostly on track," no "it's just a small delay." Real ownership sounds like *we missed the mark, here's what happened, here's what I'm accountable for*. And then over-correct. Restructure the process, add checkpoints, bring in an outside perspective. An asymmetrical response is what signals you're taking this seriously enough to go past the minimal fix.

What you're actually doing across all three is acting as a heat shield. You're absorbing the organizational stress and anxiety instead of letting it cascade down onto the people who have to do the work of fixing the thing. That's the job. And both your team and your leadership will remember how you showed up in that moment far longer than they'll remember the miss itself.

0:00 Why leaders need a crisis framework

0:21 Scott Galloway's 3-rule framework

0:51 Adapting it for tech leadership

1:07 What this looks like in practice

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