The secret ingredient to family business success is productive conflict. We can turn conflict into an opportunity with the right mindset and processes. While it is a key ingredient for success it is also the number one reason for wealth loss.

Crisis response or crisis management team is a term well known to many of us. In my opinion, every company needs one. But do we know what this term means and what the purpose of these teams is?

We have all experienced “gut feeling” before. Should we follow it and what exactly is it?

In a crisis one will face multiple challenges. A lot of these challenges present themselves as paradoxes - a problem that has two opposite forces. If you solve one side of the problem, the other gets worse and vice versa. What do you do then? Isn’t this hopeless?

Your resources are scarce, and you are under immense time pressure. Your peers have already declared you are/your business is done for. What are you left with? You are left with yourself and that is where managing your own personal reseources comes in. The better you do this, the better you are equiped to face anything that life throws at you.

In the Stanford Design Thinking Process one out of the 5 stages of the design process is called “Define”. This stage highlights the importance of defining a problem, in order to solve it. Usually in product design you will do this with a problem definition followed by a product specification. The same applies to a crisis. In order to solve a crisis, you first need to define the crisis.

In 2015-2018 I had the privilege to manage a crisis in our family business. In his article I share my top learnings from this experience and hope that this will help many in the current situation.

Especially in crisis you will not have many decisions with a clarity about them. Thus, your ability to think in probabilities becomes incredibly valuable. By using probabilistic thinking your chances of success in a crisis will increase dramatically.

Coming from an engineering background, I principally use the Design Thinking Process when solving problems. After much reflection, I have noticed that the way designers and product developers think is not used a lot in management. So, how does one apply Design Thinking in crisis management?

Making the right decisions is probably the most important skill you can have in life. In a crisis scenario, the decisions you make are even more crucial than under normal circumstances. Therefore, in this article will cover nine tips for effective decision-making in times of crisis.

In this article we shall have a look at how the wisdom of stoic philosophers can be applied in a crisis or rather how stoic wisdom will help you get through a crisis.