184: The Human Side Of Crisis Recovery, Part 1

Your systems can be back online while your people are still underwater.

That gap, the space between operational recovery and human recovery, is where a lot of what people think of as resilience fails. I take you inside the question that changed my work: How confident are you that your business continuity plan will hold up when the team executing it is terrified, traumatized, or numb?

Listen to part one of my presentation to the Business Continuity Institute's (BCI) Business Continuity & Resilience Awareness Week (BCAW+R) 2026. Mine was one of dozens of presentations on the topic: Think You're Resilient? Well, Think Again.

In this episode, I discuss the contrast between what people think resilience culture is in an organization and what it really is. Not perks. Not slogans. Culture as leadership behavior under pressure, psychological safety, and the trust signals people scan for when their brains are overloaded.

We dig into why decision-making degrades in crisis, why silence from leaders makes people invent scarier stories, and why saying “we’re back up and running” can land as emotional whiplash for some. You’ll also hear about the two timelines every crisis creates: the measurable operational recovery timeline and the messy, non-linear human recovery timeline that can last months or years, sometimes leading to PTSD or delayed struggles that are easy to miss.

If you care about crisis management, business continuity planning, or simply leading people through hard days, this is a practical reframe you can apply immediately. 

Subscribe for part two, share this with a leader who owns the plan, and leave a review with the one communication habit you want every crisis leader to practice.

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Transcript

When Leaders Declare Victory

Manya Chylinski 0:01

The human recovery one often takes longer than you want it to take. And what happens sometimes is once operations get back to normal, leaders sometimes declare victory. All right, we're good, we're back, we're up and running. But the people side might not have been fully dealt with, and people don't feel that they're ready to get back up and running. So there's a mismatch in what leaders are saying and what the people are feeling. Hello and welcome to Notes on Resilience. I'm your host, Manya Chylinski. And today is a special episode, part one of two parts. Think you're resilient? Well, think again. This is a presentation I gave for the Business Continuity Institute, Business Continuity and Resilience Awareness Week. And I'm so grateful that they're letting me share this with all of my listeners. Where I talk about it's important to have a business continuity plan or crisis management plan. Absolutely. And you also need to have a plan for dealing with the humans after a crisis. Hope you enjoy part one.

A Columbine Survivor’s Two Sentences

Manya Chylinski 1:18

A few days after the Boston Marathon bombing, I sent a message to this project manager that I was working with. I told him I'd been at the finish line, I wasn't physically hurt, but I was more affected than I realized. And I was gonna miss my deadline, and I didn't know when I was gonna get back on. And I think it's important to note the deadline was about two hours from the time I was writing this email. He wrote back two sentences. I understand I was at Columbine. That was it. No process, no questions. When do you think you can get back on track? He just knew because he had lived through something that changed how he thinks about people in a crisis. And it showed up in that moment. And I've spent a lot of time since that day thinking about what did he have that the institutional crisis response didn't

The Hidden Gap In Resilience Plans

Manya Chylinski 2:21

have. Now, I know a lot of you, most of you, maybe everyone, you are in the business continuity world. You probably have a plan, and it's probably a good one, right? You've tested it, you've documented it, you've updated it, when things have changed, you've done the work. Well, I have a question. How confident are you your plan is going to work when the people who are executing it are terrified or traumatized or numb? Because I see a gap in how we talk about resilience, right? You build your plan during normal conditions, right? Everything's okay. And you have to imagine what it will be like in the crisis? What will we need to be thinking about? What will we be worried about, et cetera? And you may know what to do as someone who has worked on other crisis plans and other business continuity work. You may have been through something yourself, and maybe some folks on the team have been, but it's probable that a lot of people on your team haven't been through a crisis and they can't truly imagine what it is like when your body just stops doing what you think it's supposed to be doing, when you're having trouble thinking, when you're worried about family and friends and co-workers. And the thing that determines whether your plan actually works under pressure is partly the quality of the plan and actually having a plan. I think obviously, obviously, that is a very important first step. But the other part of it is the culture of the people who are executing the plan. And that's what I want to talk about today. Your honest answer to this question tells you more about how resilient your organization is than the content of what is in your plan. And you've probably made significant investments in your business continuity planning, ISO 22301, all of that stuff. And the premise is if we plan for the right things, we use the right words, we test the right scenarios, that the plan will perform when we need it. And that is true. It's also, from my perspective, incomplete. You've probably seen this quote, you know this. We don't rise to the level of our expectations, we fall to the level of our training. And that's the whole purpose of creating the plan ahead of time and practicing and tabletop exercises. And that is all great for operational readiness. But have you fully reckoned with the idea that that also applies to leadership behavior under pressure? So

Training Leaders For Human Reality

Manya Chylinski 5:10

the whole purpose of the plan and the exercises and the training is to build that muscle memory. So you're not figuring it out in the moment of crisis. So I don't see a gap in the operational side of things, but I'm wondering, are you training your leaders on the human side with the same rigor that you're training on the operational side? Are you helping people understand how to communicate when people are scared, when they're scared or traumatized? Are you saying how to stay present in the moment and especially stay present once things look operationally back to normal? And are you helping leaders understand how to recognize that someone who says they're fine might not be fine? And right now, it feels like a lot of us treat that as instinct. That is something our leaders have or they don't have. But leaning back on instinct isn't a great resilience strategy. If your leaders have not practiced communicating in uncertainty, when they're uncertain, when they know that others are uncertain, they're not going to do it well in the moment. If your culture isn't one where people can share information honestly, you're not going to start doing that in a crisis. So does your crisis plan and your continuity plan right now account for the cognitive load that people are going to be dealing with in a crisis?

Cognitive Load And Broken Decision Making

Manya Chylinski 6:39

So this grows up dramatically when we're dealing with a crisis. When we're dealing with strong emotions, it is harder to hear information, to understand what we're hearing, and to remember what we've heard. And I bet all of you have had this experience at some point in your life because think about somebody looks at you and says, somebody, a spouse looks at you and says, I want a divorce. Or your partner says, I'm breaking up with you. Or a doctor gives you a terrible diagnosis, or your best friend calls you to tell you that their doctor gave them a terrible diagnosis. And then you're telling someone the story later, and they say, Well, what did they say then? And you struggle to remember because you were dealing with the strong emotion, the fear and the anger and the trauma of hearing that question or that information. And our decision making degrades in those kind of circumstances. And in those cases, we lean on things we trust. So the plan. I trust the plan. I'm a leader, I trust the plan. Well, if I'm not involved in the plan, I might not trust the plan, but I might trust the manager who is executing the plan or the executive leader who's executing the plan. I'm going to look for the signals that they are giving about what they know about what's going on, what they know about what they're doing. And that's going to determine partly how steady I feel. Do I trust the leaders? And that's the culture. And that is an asset or a liability before a crisis ever hits. And when

Trust Signals And Psychological Safety

Manya Chylinski 8:32

I talk about resilience culture, I'm not just talking about having ping pong tables or a yoga app or paid time off or employee engagement skills or wellness initiatives. Those might be very important in your organization and they certainly can be helpful. But I'm talking about something more specific. So how do your leaders behave, especially in a crisis? Do they behave in a way that people will trust them, or are they behaving in a way that erodes trust? Do your employees feel seen and heard and understood? Especially when a situation is moving fast and it's unclear. And I'm talking a little bit about psychological safety, right? Do people feel that they can ask questions? They can share information, they can share difficult information without being judged or humiliated. So there are two timelines here. We've got the operational recovery timeline. Your systems are down. How long is it going to take to get them back up? Who do we need to engage to get them back up? What do you need to do? You know, what are the steps we need to take to get them running again? Your facility is inaccessible. Okay, how long is it going to take to get that back up and running? Or are we going to find a different place for our employees to work until that gets back up and running? How long is it going to take to repair it if the physical facility was damaged? And that's what the continuity plans are built to address because they have a start and an end and measurable progress. The building is open or it's not open, the system is running or it's not running. And there's a clear end state where things are back to normal or some version of normal. The second timeline is the human recovery timeline. And that's different. And that's how long does it take people to actually feel okay again and get back to feeling steady and like they can get back to work, back to trusting their leadership that has a handle on things, um, to get back to a normal level of functioning or something close to a normal level of functioning. And these two timelines are not the same. The operational recovery, if there hasn't been any or a lot of physical damage, that piece often can be quite short. Or if you've had a lot of physical damage, then it's extremely long while you're rebuilding a facility.

Operational Versus Human Recovery Timelines

Manya Chylinski 11:05

But the human recovery one often takes longer than you want it to take. And what happens sometimes is once operations get back to normal, leaders sometimes declare victory. All right, we're good. We're back, we're up and running. But the people side might not have been fully dealt with, and people don't feel that they're ready to get back up and running. So there's a mismatch in what leaders are saying and what the people are feeling. That human timeline, and you know this if you've ever gone through any kind of trauma, it's not linear and it's not uniform, and it definitely doesn't happen in the timeline that you want it to as the person who's going through it. Some people process things quickly and they genuinely are fine and they move on. Others are still carrying it months or years later. And for a small percentage of people, truly a small percentage, what started out as distress could become something clinical, something that diagnosable, it has a name. So in my case, after the bombing, I was there with several friends. The woman who was sitting next to me, a few weeks after the bombing, she legitimately was fine. She kind of brushed herself off and went on with her life. It just became this thing that happened, but it was no longer distressing to her. In my case, I developed post-traumatic stress disorder, PTSD. And I struggled with that for a few years, not full-fledged all the time, but it took me quite a while to get to a point where that day was just a day in my past. And there's also a third group of people after a crisis, and they can be very difficult to see. Those are the people who seem fine right afterwards. They perform fine. If you ask them, they will actually tell you that they're fine. But then six or 12 or 18 months later, they start to struggle. And sometimes they can connect it back to that crisis. And sometimes they can't. They don't understand why they're struggling. Those can be the hardest people to see after a crisis. And the fact is, you cannot look at your team after a crisis and know which category anyone is in. But but we can't either. As the people going through it, they're not going to understand which category they're in either. And that's how trauma and crisis works. And I know that

Communication Mistakes After A Crisis

Manya Chylinski 13:49

in these cases, leaders are almost always well-intentioned and doing their best. But you can get it wrong. So if you claim the incident is over, but people don't feel it's over yet, and you and they're still feeling distressed, the leader might want to move into, okay, let's talk about the lessons learned. But people aren't feeling that they've had time to process it. So they're not ready to talk about lessons learned. Or a leader only communicates operationally, you know, here's what's going on with our systems, with our facilities, here's the status, and here's what we're doing about it. And if they don't address the emotional reality, people can really struggle with that. Or even worse, leaders will sometimes be silent, right? They won't know what to say or afraid that if you say what's happening or you talk about it, that that's going to cause people to be distressed rather than it actually acknowledging their distress. And when you don't communicate the story, people make it up in their own minds. I mean, we've all done this at certain in certain cases, right? And the story that we write in the absence of information is almost always way worse than what's actually happening. And the leaders who get this right, they stay present. Even after the operational pieces have gotten resolved, they acknowledge the human experience and they don't rush the timeline. They recognize that people deal with their experiences in their own time, whether that's days, weeks, or years.

What The Boston Marathon Bombing Felt Like

Manya Chylinski 15:28

So my own experience is how I started to learn all this information. April 15th, 2013, I was at the finish line of the Boston Marathon. I went almost every year since I'd moved to Boston. I loved it. It was this 26-mile-long party that ended not far from where I lived. And it was great. I would, I love standing there because for some people, you could tell that that finishing the marathon was this amazing personal accomplishment. And for others, I mean, some of the elite runners sometimes look like they just jogged from around the corner. They look so comfortable. It's amazing. And it's great to see that variation of runners. And sometimes people put their name on their shirt, and I'm the person who would be yelling, all right, Carlos, you've almost got this. Way to go. And I loved it. And in 2013, we got tickets to the bleacher seats at the finish line, which was only the second time I'd ever been that close to the finish line. And at 2:49 p.m., that's where I was standing when a bomb explodes across the street from me. And I am frozen in place. And I don't know how, but I somehow knew it was a bomb. And I see the smoke cloud getting bigger, and I see the people across the street running away. And then I see this woman standing in front of a shattered plate glass window. And as much as I'm having conscious thoughts, I'm thinking, how is this person still standing there? A bomb just went off. And as my brain is trying to click over and process this, the second bomb goes off a few hundred feet down the street. And I turn to look at that one, and I see the cloud rising up. And I'm just thinking, I don't, what is this? What is happening? This is not my city. I don't get this. And my next thought was, we have to get out of here. And I said that to my friend, although I didn't know that I said that to my friend. I didn't hear it. For those last 15 or 20 seconds, all I heard were the explosions. So we evacuated the bleachers, and my friends and I got separated. So I was with one friend, and we went around the corner to the front of the Boston Public Library. If you're familiar with Boston, the entrance on Dartmouth Street, and we stopped there to wait to gather with our other friends. And I realized I was sobbing. And it was the first of many, many tears over the last 13 years. I'm so grateful that I wasn't physically hurt. And in those moments when I was so distressed, I thought I was okay because I hadn't

Invisible Wounds And Institutional Silence

Manya Chylinski 18:28

been physically hurt. Now, in the weeks that followed, the city responded to the families of those who were killed, to those with physical injuries. And there are systems for that, right? There's triage for physical injuries and there's protocols for how do we deal with this. But for those of us whose injuries were not visible, we had the psychological wounds, the institutions were pretty quiet. I looked for information on what I could do to recover. I looked for information that there were other people like me who were struggling, that they weren't physically injured, but that they were struggling emotionally and mentally. And I didn't see anything on the news coverage. I watched so many press conferences, and I would listen to everybody, the police chief, the mayor, the governor, desperate for them to say something about those of us with mental health wounds. And there just wasn't that. It just was not part of the conversation. So a few months later, I wrote some letters to my governor, my mayor, my city counselors, my state representatives. Okay, they were pretty long letters. I felt like I had a lot of information to share, and I am the queen of the sternly worded letter. Um, because I was under the impression that the reason they weren't talking about the mental health wounds, and the reason they weren't, there weren't as many services and obvious support mechanisms for us was they didn't know we existed. So I said, all right, I'll write them a letter, I'll tell them we exist, and then things will change. So I said, hey, we need help, we exist. This privately funded victim compensation fund that you created, one fund, we're not allowed to participate. Only people with physical injuries, and they're rejecting anybody else who applies. So can you help us? Well, I got a phone call from the governor's office. This very lovely woman worked in his staff. She was caring, she was compassionate, she asked me questions, she asked about my experience, if I was willing to share. She wanted to know what kind of help was I getting, did I need any other resources? So she was willing to help me personally, but nothing changed in terms of the entire response. It was not a systemic

Letters To City Hall And A Cold Reply

Manya Chylinski 20:53

response that she was offering me. And then I got this response from the the mayor's office. You will have to contact one fund directly at phone number regarding victim assistance. Mayor Menino and Boston City Hall are not involved with this issue. Sincerely, the mayor's correspondence staff. I wrote to my mayor saying I was traumatized on the streets of Boston by a bomb going off, and I need help. And this is what they wrote back. There's no acknowledgement of the human side, no recognition that I might be struggling, and not even the name of a human being who wrote this letter. Now, to be fair, if I wrote this letter to somebody who wrote to me traumatized and this is what I wrote back to them, I certainly wouldn't put my name on it.