Have you ever had one of those stomach churning moments.
When you realise you have deleted (with no backup) the project you have been working on, and there is no way back.
Or, that the mainframe disk drive, being pushed back into position falls through the raised floor, which you see happening in slow time, like in the movies.
In that moment, time seems to stop. It becomes hyper realistic. You know it is too late, not in the moment but in the microseconds that follow it. Your brain knows something significant has just happened and takes control as you process it.
You go through the denial, "this isn't happening to me", as your brain processes the threat
Then the anger, this is unfair, as you trigger your loss aversion. The work that it will take to recover.
Then things get messy. The recovery. When you realise the damage is done, the only question is whether you can recover the situation, or mitigate the damage. It becomes all-action.
I have been there. The disk drive happened on my watch, as did the realisation that a database had been corrupted. Early lessons in making sure you have backups and how to reload them and recover from them.
This week, the stomach churning feeling was the engineer at Antrhopic who accidently exposed much of the Claude Code source, including new features, their internal archtecture (a source of competitive advantage) and a new model, called "Capybara".
A security engineer spotted the mistake and quickly mirrored the code on GitHub, which went viral, making containment essentially impossible.
What was meant to be private, is now public.
There is some irony that the company positioning itself as the 'safety first' AI Lab accidently shipped its own source code twice in one week.
But for many of us, we felt the pain of the engineer, that stomach turning moment when you realise.
So what are some practical things you can do when you feel the churn.
→ Breathe. You may not realise it, but you are probably holding your breath.
→ If there is a switch that should be turned off, turn it off.
→ Quick damage assessment. Does the fix need to be quick to reduce exposure, or thoughtful to protect quality
→ Manage stakeholders. They don't like surprises. This is the time to let someone know who can take on the management. If you are the project lead, this is you - step up now.
→ Put options on the table. To feel less as though you are being held hostage.
→ Suspend blame. It can be easy to blame, but don't, openness is essential.
Even better, practice doomsday scenarios for your team or business. The more you practice, like soldiers doing drills, the more likely you are to have built neuro pathways that you can use or adapt to recover the situation.
We run wargaming regularly for our clients, and tuck scenario exercises into our SteerCo's. We are preparing them for what may happen, not what is happening, so that when it does happen, they respond quickly.
It works. Work smarter, not harder.
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