Time Frame of a Crisis

RESPOND
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COVID-19
The Hub of Recovery
and Resilience

RESPOND > RECOVER > THRIVE / COMMAND CENTER
COVID-19: The Hub of Recovery and Resilience / 2
We have developed supporting material across these
priority areas to support leaders as they develop the
recovery playbook:
Valuing Trust
Command Center
Strategy
Workforce
Business Continuity & Financing
Supply Chain
Customer
Technology & Digital
Cyber
M&A
Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG)
2. Recover
Resilient leaders view recovery as a journey
for their organization, teams and stakeholders.
There are five imperatives within the Recover
phase to guide the business from Respond
to Thrive:
1. Understand the required mindset shift;
2. Identify and navigate the uncertainties
and implications;
3. Embed trust as the catalyst to recovery;
4. Define the destination and launch the
recovery playbook; and
5. Learn from other’s successes.
For more information on Recover, please explore
The Essence of Resilient Leadership: Business
Recovery from COVID-19.
1. Respond
As an organization responds to crisis, resilient leaders are defined first by five qualities which distinguish
between surviving and thriving amidst crisis. Next, resilient leaders must take specific actions spanning three
dimensions and evaluate them within the context of geographic location and sector. Finally, learnings from
those experiencing the same crisis conditions should be leveraged to manage the response.
For more information on Respond, please explore The Heart of Resilient Leadership: Responding to COVID-19.
3. Thrive
Preparing for the next normal. Supporting materials to come.
A typical crisis plays out over three time frames: Respond,
in which a company deals with the present situation and
manages continuity; Recover, during which a company
learns and emerges stronger; and Thrive, where the
company prepares for and shapes the “next normal.”

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How a command center can
guide the work of recovering
and building resiliency
As organizations move from rapid response to
thoughtful recovery and organizational resilience,
leaders should centralize and empower a command
center to direct action on the process of rebuilding,
restoring, and recovering. In the recovery phase,
an organization begins to evaluate its structure,
the market, and social shifts that should create
opportunities to grow and change.
Why a Command Center?
A command center serves as the face and arms of an
organization’s leadership in steering an organization
to the recovery phase and beyond. The right time to
activate the recovery plan will vary across geographies
and sectors and even among different companies
in the same geography and sector. Regions where
the infection rate has subsided will be more likely to
sustain activation than regions where the disease is still
spreading. Sectors that have suffered a lesser impact,
such as media or technology, may shift to recovery
much earlier than heavily affected sectors such as
transportation or leisure. And each company will likely
have its own, localized conditions: a widely dispersed
back-office support center may be able to begin recovery
efforts sooner than close-quartered operating units.
Executives can expect a mix of signals and indicators to
sort through, business conditions to observe, regulatory
and legal actions to consider, and investor expectations
to meet. No single answer will be correct for all
organizations and all regions.

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The command center is expected to sort through these issues. It is
a cross-functional leadership hub to help manage the organization
by performing the following actions and priorities:
• Creating situational awareness of the most urgent
issues and directing them to key decision-makers.
• Setting clear strategic objectives and indicators to
monitor progress and measure success so that
the organization moves from crisis management and
response to project management and recovery
• Supporting strategic trust drivers necessary to the
organization and its stakeholders
• Analyzing and assessing incoming information and
communicating accurate, reassuring, and helpful
information to stakeholders
• Building organizational resilience as a long-term
competitive advantage
• Balancing near-term health, safety, and continuity goals
with long-term planning and consideration of tactical
and strategic consequences of crisis
• Making recommendations and escalating strategic
challenges to executives
• Capturing key lessons
• Performing ongoing scenario planning, planning
alternate responses
• Enhancing response capabilities

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How a Command
Center is Structured
and Operates
A command center functions best when it is set up to
meet the primary challenges of a crisis—and only those
challenges. The command center must be structured in
such a way that it has the full confidence of the entire
C-suite and board of directors and enjoys the proxy to
make decisions when necessary.
The command center should have an enterprise-wide
understanding of the impact of COVID-19 on business
operations and on a variety of key stakeholders:
employees, investors, vendors, suppliers, clients,
customers, regulators, and others. In addition, the
command center should be able to collect and
disseminate mission-critical information, coordinate
efforts across functions, raise awareness of new
developments, and respond to fast-moving events.
It must have clarity of purpose and be led by executives
who are empowered to push all other priorities to the
side and are mandated to respond to whatever the
crisis demands. Ideally, a command center is led by one
person or a very small team who are supported by a
chief of staff, a project manager or managers, executive
administrators and schedulers, and anyone else
necessary to meet the responsibilities of a command
center until the crisis has passed. That means preparing
presentation materials, logging key decisions and
rationale, tracking actions, structuring meetings, and
other relevant tasks.
A command center has on its team executives and
leaders with specialized understanding and capabilities
that are essential in a crisis. In addition to business
operational leaders, it includes marketing/sales,
communications, talent and HR, legal and regulatory,
cybersecurity and technology, and finance.
As a result, the command center may enlist
subcommittees or specialized teams to handle specific
tasks or workstreams. Through the delegation of
responsibilities and close tracking of progress toward
meeting immediate targets, the command center can
provide the valuable services of supporting colleagues
when they face setbacks, developing alternative
strategies when necessary, and strengthening morale.
A command center—when properly structured, staffed,
and mandated—can be a powerful engine for the
organization during the recovery phase. It can set
the tone for what helps the organization thrive in the
months and years to come, when the organization
prepares for and shapes the “next normal.”

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Key Principles & Tasks
Restore confidence and build trust
A command center can restore confidence, instill
trust, and support a positive and optimistic spirit by
being transparent, stressing the need to persevere
through any challenge and applying whatever effort
and thinking is necessary to reach a specific goal. Trust
is not an amorphous and abstract goal but rather
a tangible and measurable foundation essential to
successfully reaffirming a strong relationship with
stakeholders through the recovery. A command center
should communicate its vision and establish a sense
Dimensions of trust: physical, digital, emotional, financial
of shared purpose, trust, and direction. Trust is built and
supported along four human dimensions: physical, which
refers to the safety of physical space; emotional, which
refers to social and emotional needs being safeguarded;
financial, which means financial concerns are being
served; and digital, which means information is secure. A
command center must monitor and support trust-building
across these four dimensions.
01
02
04
03
Physical
Trust that your physical
space is safe.
Financial
Trust that your financial
concerns are being served.
Emotional
Trust that your emotional
and societal needs are
being safeguarded.
Digital
Trust that your
information is secure.

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Maintaining Energy and
Staying Focused
The command center has a special emotional purpose:
to build a spirit of collaboration, shared purpose, and
direction so that an entire organization works together
and perseveres through challenges. A command center
should strike the right balance between realism and
optimism and explain to its stakeholders what they
can expect and what is expected of them. This creates
positive energy, an essential part of building trust and
maintaining focus.
By the very definition of this unprecedented crisis,
command centers will likely have experience gaps in
dealing with pandemics. Therefore, command centers
often will identify key vulnerabilities only in retrospect
while addressing them in the present tense. These run
the gamut of operational and strategic issues and
require the input of a broad range of key stakeholders,
especially in the executive ranks and board of directors.
It is vital that command center leadership not be
distracted from its key objectives. Rather,
they should stay focused on managing the crisis by
addressing incidents and operational issues and
setting clear indicators to monitor progress and
measure success.
This is difficult because in the current crisis, the velocity
of information has accelerated, making calm decision-
making and priority-setting harder. In the recovery
phase, information is still fast-moving and fast-changing,
but the command center should be able to address
critical issues and work within the organization to
drive long-term and strategic conversations about
organizational resilience and transformation.
COVID-19: The Hub of Recovery and Resilience
Driving Strategic Conversations
While the command center will seek to make decisions
quickly, it should not supplant or disrupt existing strategic
thinking. Rather, it should troubleshoot problems in real
time, get information to key leaders quickly, prevent
misinformation, and focus most of all on stabilizing
the situation.
Achieving all these goals can help the organization’s
leaders focus on strategic questions
• How will COVID-19 reshape the market?
• What changes should we make to account for this
risk going forward?
• What does organizational resilience look like for
our organization?
• What opportunities do we have now that we did not
have before?
These questions may not be answerable in the
response phase; but during the recovery phase,
they are appropriate. A command center should
identify organizational resilience and transformation
opportunities and prepare next steps to enable
coordinated actions. It might need to establish special
teams to implement these changes.

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Building Organizational Resilience
A command center should have the mandate of building
organizational resilience both in the near term and
beyond. That is why it is essential that a command center
document the transformation opportunities so that
executives can reflect on them later.
The organization should enhance its resilience so that
future command center leaders are able to better
anticipate, respond to, and resolve potential value
killers, no matter the disruption or change. The most
successful organizations in any crisis are those that have
a built-in understanding of what’s needed, a process
and a plan to set up necessary structures, and an
awareness of external resources that can assist them
in the future. That is why organizational resilience is
one potential outcome from COVID-19. Because it has
so many impacts and such a large reach, it may well
create many opportunities for long-term resilience.
An organization that has gone through the fire of an
existential crisis may also become more agile and more
open to preparing for unseen or unknown future crises.
This organizational resilience is not ancillary to effective
operations and growth; it is essential to achieving them.
It is the command center’s responsibility to ensure that
opportunities to improve organizational resilience are
documented and begin the work of taking action to seize
those opportunities.
Capturing Insights
Never far from the minds of those leading the
command center should be the collection, recording,
and implementation of lessons learned and leading
practices. Many organizations were unprepared for
the unprecedented effects and risks of COVID-19. It is,
therefore, the command center’s responsibility to keep
good records of the actions that had to be taken, and of
mistakes that were made, so that the organization
can be better prepared for a future crisis. For example,
organizations have to take account of their digital
preparedness. Were they able to easily shift operations
to virtual workspaces? Were their supplier networks too
geographically centered in one place and therefore far
more exposed to regional crises? The answers to these
questions are knowable, but the impact they have may be
forgotten—and it is the command center’s responsibility
to make sure they’re not.

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Communication
From the outset of the crisis, a command center has
to sort through incoming information and ensure its
reliability so as to direct response efforts. It must have a
monopoly on the dissemination of mission-critical work
and information regarding the crisis so that everyone
in an organization knows where to turn to get reliable
information. It also needs to assert that the crisis—at
every stage—is understood factually, that impacts are
well-understood and appreciated, and that response
and recovery efforts are clear as well. The command
center should explain the issues and actions in plain and
straightforward terms so that audiences understand what
they need to know, do, and feel. They should use simple
language to explain what has been done, why it was done,
and what next steps are going to be. Communication
should address the questions stakeholders ask
themselves. In a large organization, it is vital that everyone
understand the greatest priorities and where they are
needed most. This is particularly important so that people
at all levels are not distracted or confused.
Consider the structure of Winston Churchill’s wartime
speeches to the British Parliament. Each began with a
careful recitation of key facts about recent events in the
war, whether negative or positive, and a reflection on their
significance.1
Then, he would lay out a program of action
and reaction, often accompanied by a spirited appeal to
the citizenry’s sense of purpose and pride. The strength
of the remarks was not merely rhetorical. Churchill was
able to prepare his audiences for action by keeping them
informed, by trusting them to understand the information
correctly, and by tapping into what he believed they
already were ready to do next.
This model for communicating during a crisis succeeds
because it trusts and empowers the audience and
articulates the course of action that makes the most
sense. It helps an organization’s leaders assert control
over events without necessarily becoming victim to them
and gives an organization a strong sense of writing its
own story and owning its own narrative.
People & Talent Issues
In the same manner, a command center attends to the
other major dimensions of how a crisis is experienced
by the workforce and related stakeholders. Questions
around virtual work and work stoppages require the
involvement of talent and human resource leaders, and
the command center needs to be able to understand
and address those issues as they occur. Importantly, as
the response phase turns into the recovery phase, the
command center faces critical questions about when
to return staff to offices, factories, and other shared
workspaces. These are not merely operational decisions
and they should take into account talent management
and workforce strategies and support trust-building,
especially around the physical and emotional.
1
Andrew Roberts, Churchill: Walking with Destiny, Andrew Roberts (New York: Penguin, 2019).

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Winding Down the
Command Center
As the organization shifts from the Recovery to the
Thrive phase, the command center should take stock of
its original objectives and assess whether they’ve been
achieved. The command center needs to be able to
answer whether the crisis is over and whether its work is
effectively concluded. This self-assessment is intended to
keep an organization from allowing its command center
to become a permanent center of decision-making.
Many organizations indeed find it difficult to downshift
from crisis mode, even when the crisis is over. But
maintaining the command center past its moment of
utility risks two things. First, a crisis mentality is exhausting
and cannot be sustained in any large organization for
too long. Second, those in charge of the command
center have other work to do and other challenges to
focus on, and they must return to that day-to-day work.
Stakeholders want organizations to have a plan to shift
back to regularity, and someone—ideally leadership—
should make it clear at the outset of the crisis that the
mandate for the command center is finite. When the
organization has adapted to the “next normal” and
achieved stability, the command center’s work is done.

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Resilience: A Legacy
Greater than Survival
When the command center’s work is done, that doesn’t
mean its memory and work product washes away. Pre-
COVID, most organizations were not in the crisis business
and suddenly found themselves in it. Post-COVID, these
same organizations may want to return to their core
competencies and succeed in the “next normal” of the
transformed marketplace.
That said, the most successful organizations will embrace
the goal of long-term resilience and will therefore
continue to think about crisis as a potential part of their
business, no different from many key issues that are
not seemingly attached to their core business. They
should expect to review their decisions and effectiveness
during this turbulent era—and learn from mistakes.
For that reason alone, many organizations may create
an organizational resilience capability building program
so that integrated cross-functional crisis-planning and
risk-identification and monitoring becomes part of the
mindset of leadership.
The great effort and concentrated attention given to
helping the organization emerge from crisis should be
a lasting legacy, appreciated by all who took part. As
with any group that works together for a concentrated
period of time on a single existential goal, the command
center and its key nodes will remain linked by a powerful
and formative experience. These leaders and managers
should expect to be forever changed by the months they
spent in close and hopefully collegial company. The bonds
of this experience are powerful, and these leaders may
well create within the organization a spirit of
perseverance.

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Authors
Chris Ruggeri
Deloitte US Risk Intelligence Leader
cruggeri@deloitte.com
Eddie Chiu
Deloitte Asia Pacific Strategic & Reputation Risk Leader
eddchiu@deloitte.com.cn
Theodorus Niemeijer
Deloitte Asia Pacific Crisis & Resilience Director
theodorus.niemeijer@tohmatsu.co.jp
Tim Johnson
Deloitte UK Crisis & Resilience Partner
timjohnson@deloitte.co.uk
Abigail Worsfold
Deloitte UK Crisis & Resilience Associate Director
aworsfold@deloitte.co.uk
Sid Maharaj
Deloitte Global Strategic & Reputation Risk Leader
sidmaharaj@deloitte.com.au
Masahiko Sugiyama
Deloitte Global Crisis & Resilience Leader
masahiko.sugiyama@tohmatsu.co.jp
Christopher Dicks
Deloitte China Strategic & Reputation Risk Director
chdicks@deloitte.com.cn
Jiak See Ng
Deloitte Asia Pacific Financial Advisory Leader
jsng@deloitte.com
Stuart Johnston
Deloitte Asia Pacific Telecom, Media and
Entertainment Sector Leader
stujohnston@deloitte.com.au
Ellen Derrick
Deloitte Asia Pacific Government and Public
Services Industry Leader
ederrick@deloitte.com.au
Nick Galletto
Deloitte Canada Future of Trust Leader
ngalletto@deloitte.ca
Praveck Geeanpersadh
Deloitte Canada Future of Trust Leader
prgeeanpersadh@deloitte.ca
Lead Authors:
Contributors:
Thanks To:

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