The First 48 Hours: What Leaders Actually Do After a Disaster

The first 48 hours after a disaster are different from everything that follows, and not primarily because they are the most dangerous. They are different because many of the decisions made in that window become difficult to reverse.

The communication pattern set on day one tends to become the pattern people expect on day thirty. The person designated as the point of contact usually remains the point of contact. A statement made before confirmation often becomes something that has to be walked back later, at a higher cost than the original silence would have carried.

Leaders in this window frequently believe their primary job is to produce answers. More often, the job is to produce structure, in a particular order.

Hours Zero to Six: Account for People

Little else can proceed reliably until you know where your people are and whether they are safe. This appears obvious and is still routinely compressed, because operational damage is visible and human status is not.

Account for everyone by name rather than by assumption. “The night shift was off site” is an assumption. A name with a confirmation beside it is an account. Use whoever can reach people fastest rather than whoever is most senior, and accept partial information rather than waiting for a complete list to assemble itself.

Two errors recur in this window. The first is routing all inbound information through the most senior person available, which creates a bottleneck at the moment speed matters most. The second is beginning external communication before internal accounting is complete, so that staff learn the situation from a public statement rather than from their own organization.

Often the only thing that needs saying publicly in the first hours is that you are aware, you are assessing, and you will provide an update at a stated time.

That is a complete and defensible statement, and it protects the hours you need.

Hours Six to Twenty-Four: Establish the Rhythm

By roughly the six hour mark, the dominant need inside an organization has usually shifted. People no longer need primarily to know what happened. They need to know when they will next hear from you.

Set an interval and hold it. Every four hours, every six, every twelve, whatever can realistically be sustained for a week. The interval often matters more than its length, because the interval is what people use to regulate themselves. An organization that knows an update arrives at eight, at noon, and at five can function in between. An organization waiting for information that arrives unpredictably tends to spend its attention on the waiting.

This is also the window to name a single point of contact for each audience. Staff, families, press, partners, and any regulator each need one named person. They do not need the same person. What they need is to stop guessing who to ask, because the guessing itself generates load the organization cannot afford at that moment.

Hours Twenty-Four to Forty-Eight: Stabilize and Hand Off

The second day is where sustainability is usually decided. By hour twenty-four, the people who responded first have been working without rest, and a leader who has been personally holding the response is approaching the limit of useful judgment.

The work of day two is handing pieces of the response to named people with defined authority, and building the second shift. This is uncomfortable, because by that point the leader often understands the situation better than anyone and delegation can feel like degradation of the response. A response that depends on one person remaining awake is not yet a response. It is a countdown.

Three handoffs are worth making before the end of the second day:

• Communication to one person who owns the update rhythm.
• Operations to one person who owns the restoration sequence.
• Welfare to one person who owns staff status, including the status of the responders themselves.

What to Say When You Do Not Know

The hardest communication problem in this window is the honest answer to a question that cannot yet be answered. Leaders often reach for one of two failures: a reassurance that cannot be supported, or silence.

A more durable third option is to name the boundary precisely. We do not yet know the cause. We expect to know more by Thursday. What can be confirmed now is that everyone is accounted for and the site is secured.

This holds up for two reasons. It delivers real information, which silence does not. And it does not create a commitment that a later finding will break, which premature reassurance often does. Reassurance that cannot be supported tends to be the most expensive sentence available in the first 48 hours, because its cost arrives later, at the moment you most need to be believed about something else.

The Mistakes That Compound

Some first-day errors remain first-day errors. These four tend not to.

The Work That Makes This Possible

Most of what is described here is considerably easier when decision authority, contact roles, and update rhythm were agreed before anything happened. Very little of it can be designed well while the phone is ringing.

That is the honest limit of a guide like this one. The first 48 hours rarely reward preparation with visible credit. They simply go better.

Questions leaders ask

About the author

Dr. Karissa Thomas

Dr. Karissa Thomas is an author, keynote speaker, and leadership strategist and the creator of the Mosaic Intelligence Method™. She holds an Ed.D. in Educational Leadership and an Executive MBA and is the author of The Mosaic Way™ Leadership Series and the Leading Through the Storm series.

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