The First 10 Minutes Using the Three Buckets to Triage Any Business Crisis

The server is down. A key supplier has just declared bankruptcy. The media is calling about a story that could damage your reputation. In the first ten minutes of a crisis, your mind is flooded with a tidal wave of urgent, competing demands. The natural human reaction is to either freeze, overwhelmed by the sheer volume of the problem, or to start fighting fires randomly, wasting precious energy on the loudest noise rather than the most critical threat.

This initial chaos is where leadership is truly tested. In my sixteen years as a Scotland Yard detective and in over three hundred kidnap-for-ransom negotiations, I learned that what you do in those first few moments dictates the trajectory of the entire crisis. The most common mistake I see leaders make is trying to solve everything at once. They get bogged down in factors they can't possibly change, leading to a state of strategic paralysis.

But what if you had a mental toolkit so simple, yet so powerful, that it could instantly bring order to that chaos? A framework that acts as a triage system for your attention, allowing you to focus your energy with surgical precision. That framework is the Three Buckets of Control.

The Framework: Control, Influence, and Let Go

Borrowed from the Stoics and battle-tested in military intelligence and crisis negotiation, this mental model forces you to categorize every aspect of a problem into one of three buckets. It's an exercise in radical clarity.

Bucket 1: Things You Directly Control

This is the most important bucket, yet it's often the smallest. It contains the only things you have absolute sovereignty over: your mindset, your decisions, your communication, and where you direct your team's focus. In a crisis, a leader who masters this bucket remains a stable anchor in a turbulent sea.

When a negotiation would stall, I couldn't control the kidnappers' demands, but I could control my team's preparation for the next call. I could control the emotional state I projected to the family. This is where your power lies. Your immediate task in any crisis is to identify every single element that belongs in this bucket and take decisive action on it.

Bucket 2: Things You Can Influence

This bucket contains the outcomes you can shape but not command. You can't control a client's anger, but you can influence it through empathetic communication. You can't control the media narrative, but you can influence it with a clear, proactive communications strategy.

This is where you apply strategic effort. It requires moving from a command-and-control mindset to one of influence and persuasion. It's about using tools like the MORE PIES framework to understand the perspectives of others and guide them toward a constructive outcome.

Bucket 3: Things You Have No Control Over

This is the danger zone. This bucket is filled with every leader's anxieties: the competitor's surprise product launch, the sudden market downturn, the fact the crisis happened in the first place. Wasting a single moment of emotional or mental energy on the contents of this bucket is a strategic error.

The discipline lies in acknowledging these factors and then consciously letting them go. This practice, known as Radical Acceptance, 'isn't about giving up. It's about liberating your focus and energy to apply them to Buckets 1 and 2, where you can actually make a difference.

Your First 10 Minutes: A Practical Guide

The next time a crisis hits, resist the urge to immediately start solving. Instead, grab a whiteboard or a piece of paper and do this:

1. Draw three columns: Label them Control, Influence, and No Control.
2. Brain Dump: Spend five minutes listing every single issue, problem, and fear related to the crisis. Get it all out.
3. Sort the List: Spend the next five minutes placing each item from your brain dump into one of the three buckets.

This simple, ten-minute exercise will fundamentally shift your perspective. The overwhelming chaos will resolve into a clear action plan. You will know exactly where to focus, what to influence, and what to ignore.

This isn't just a management technique; it's a leadership discipline. It's the foundational step to moving from a reactive firefighter to a calm, strategic commander. It is how you begin to bring order out of chaos.

Is your team struggling to focus during a crisis? A workshop on the Three Buckets framework can provide the clarity and alignment needed to navigate any challenge. Chat with Scott to learn how this crisis-tested tool can benefit your organisation.