What England’s World Cup night can teach you about crisis management (even if, like me, you couldn’t care less about football)
I woke up this morning to the news discussing the England match (and the update to my position in the family sweepstake….I still have Norway, France and Spain which I am told is good!). Ten men, a red card, three penalties, and a 3-2 win against the co-hosts in a stadium that apparently hates them. I still haven’t watched a single clip. But the story itself was too good to ignore, because underneath all the shouting and the flags, it’s basically a case study in how organisations cope when things go wrong.
So bear with me. This is not a football blog. I am the wrong person to write one. This is a blog about what happens when a plan meets reality and reality doesn’t play fair.
The plan doesn't make the risk go away
The first thing that struck me, once someone explained it to me properly, is that England knew the altitude in Mexico City was going to be a problem. It had been talked about for weeks. There was a plan for it. And it still caught up with them near the end of the match, when legs got heavier and decisions got slower. That’s not a failure of planning. That’s just what happens. You can identify a risk, prepare for it properly, and still feel its effects on the day. The plan doesn’t remove the risk. It just means you’re not starting from zero when it turns up.
Losing a key person doesn't have to mean losing the whole thing
The second thing was losing a player to a red card partway through. In most workplaces, losing a key person in the middle of a crisis is the moment things start to slide. Not enough people, not enough hands, nobody quite sure who’s covering what. From what I’m told, England didn’t fall apart. They reorganised and kept going with fewer resources than they started with. Whether anyone in that dressing room has ever heard the phrase business continuity plan, I’ve no idea, but that’s exactly what one looks like in practice.
The exciting bit isn't the hard bit
The bit I found most interesting, though, is the one nobody seems to be talking about when they describe the match. Everyone’s excited about the two goals scored in under two minutes. Fair enough, that’s the exciting bit. But the genuinely difficult part of that game was apparently the forty-odd minutes after that, holding on with ten men while the crowd got louder and the other side smelled an opening. Anyone can manage a good five minutes when adrenaline is doing the work for them. Managing the next forty, when you’re tired and down a player and everyone’s watching, is a different skill entirely.
It’s a pattern I see time and again in resilience planning generally. Plenty of organisations can pull off a strong first hour when a crisis hits, adrenaline carries people a long way early on. The far harder skill is holding that same standard for as long as it actually takes to see it through, whether that’s a cyber incident, a supply chain failure, or a building falling over. The exciting response gets all the attention. The boring, exhausting bit afterwards is where most plans quietly fall apart.
So what's the point?
So if there’s a point buried in all this football I still haven’t watched, it’s this. Identifying your risks is only step one, and it won’t stop them affecting you when they arrive. Losing a key person mid-crisis doesn’t have to mean losing the whole thing, provided you’ve thought about how the rest of the team covers the gap. And the real test of any plan isn’t the dramatic first response. It’s whether you can keep holding the line long after the initial excitement has worn off
If any of that sounds like something worth thinking through properly, rather than picking up second-hand over breakfast the way I did, our Introduction to Crisis Management and Introduction to Business Continuity courses are a good, straightforward place to start. No jargon, no lectures, just the practical version of what I’ve written above.
I’m told England play Norway next. I will, in all likelihood, hear about that one over breakfast too.
