When Apollo 13 faced catastrophic failure, it became their finest hour. A critical bug or mis-sent alert matters less than what you do next. Rebuild trust by involving stakeholders, communicating transparently, and using the crisis to strengthen processes and relationships.
Turn disasters into your finest hour. There's a line from Apollo 13 where someone talks about the incident and it being the worst disaster in NASA's history, and the director, the final director says, "I think this could be our finest hour." And I think that's true for a lot of businesses. We have something go wrong, like maybe we introduce a major bug into our software, maybe our QA caused us to go send an alert to a bunch of people that really shouldn't have gotten an alert. Any number of things can go wrong, and I've seen a lot of things go wrong with my businesses and clients and just with my friends. And I gotta tell you that the difference between the ones that can crack a company and the ones that don't aren't the severity of the incident, it's what you do after. Because the opportunity is to say, "Alright, something went wrong. Here's how we're going to rebuild trust, and here's how we're going to make this better than ever, and here's why we're going to include you in our process." If you can take the opportunity for a disaster and say, "This is a way for us to come together and build trust together," you can have Your finest hour.
