When the Crisis Comes: Dick Richardson on Leadership, Storytelling, and Staying Calm Ten Seconds Longer

What do we discover about ourselves when there is no time left to prepare?

In this episode of Leadership Story Talks, Jerome Deroy and Julienne Ryan speak with Dick Richardson, founder of Let’s Think Smart and a longtime leadership development expert whose career has included major roles at IBM and ITT, experiential leadership work with senior executives, and decades of studying how people think, decide, and behave under pressure.

When Jerome asked Dick to share an experience that shaped who he is today, Dick chose one of the most dramatic imaginable: US Airways Flight 1549, the “Miracle on the Hudson.”

Dick was sitting in seat 18F when the aircraft struck birds shortly after takeoff and lost both engines.

What stayed with him afterward was not only the extraordinary fact that everyone survived. It was how closely the experience reflected what he had spent years studying about human behavior, crisis, and leadership.

“This Is Not Happening”

Dick remembers the flash of light, debris, smoke, and then the sudden quiet as the engines failed.

His first thought was simple: this is not happening. Later, he learned that Captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger had described essentially the same initial reaction. Denial comes first. Then emotion.

Dick’s first instinct was to reach for his phone and call his wife. Almost immediately, another part of his mind began catching up. He had experienced an aircraft fire before and understood that this might end badly. If he was going to survive, he needed to stop reacting and start focusing. He put the phone back into his suitcoat pocket and began doing what he had been trained to do. He counted the seats to the exit. He paid attention. His world became smaller and more immediate.

That narrowing of attention is something Dick remembers clearly. In a crisis, the mind stops dealing with the whole future and begins concentrating on the next thing that must be done. The plane landed on the Hudson in the middle of January. Then Dick faced another problem: He had never learned to swim.

As he stepped toward the wing, surrounded by freezing water, he found himself thinking that life was throwing obstacles at him rather quickly. Yet even in that extraordinary situation, something else struck him: people were remarkably calm.

The cabin was not filled with the screaming chaos we might imagine from films. Passengers helped one another. Flight attendants did their jobs. People cooperated. For someone who had spent a career studying leadership under pressure, it was deeply affirming.

“It Ain’t Gonna Be Today”

Standing on the wing, Dick was suddenly grabbed by another passenger. A woman clamped onto his arm and told him they were sinking and going to die. Dick describes his response as his one “John Wayne moment.”

“Yeah,” he told her, “but it ain’t gonna be today.”

Then his training took over. He asked her name. Pam. He looked her in the eye. He kept her focused. He explained what was happening as other passengers tried to free the emergency slide, which could serve as a life raft. He gave her something concrete to do and something specific to believe would happen next. When the raft deployed, Dick told her they would jump on the count of three.

He said, “One!”

Pam jumped. And took Dick with her.

The humor of the memory now sits alongside the seriousness of what happened. But the principle beneath it is central to Dick’s work: when people are frightened, good leadership often means helping them move from an overwhelming situation to the next manageable action.

Later, in the ferry terminal, wrapped in Red Cross blankets, Dick saw Pam making her way toward him. She extended her hand and politely said, “I don’t know if you remember me, but I’m Pam Chaplin.” Dick could hardly believe it. They had nearly died together minutes earlier. The moment made him laugh, but it also revealed something deeply human. As soon as people can, they begin moving back toward normality. They return to manners, social expectations, and familiar ways of being.

We respond to crisis. Then we try to find our way home.

Leadership Is Tested in the Storm

Dick had been fascinated by leadership under stress long before Flight 1549.

As a teenager, he read about a maritime disaster and became interested in how leadership decisions contributed to unnecessary loss of life. That interest stayed with him throughout his career.

There is an old idea, Dick noted, that any captain can sail in calm water. The real test comes in the storm.

The same is true in organizations.

Leadership becomes visible during layoffs, reorganizations, uncertainty, health emergencies, financial pressure, or sudden disruption. When circumstances are easy, many people can appear composed and competent. Stress reveals whether the underlying habits are actually there.

Dick saw this repeatedly during the COVID pandemic. Some leaders stepped forward with clarity and humanity. Others disappeared.

His own experience on the Hudson reinforced the same lesson. Leadership was not located only in the cockpit. It appeared among flight attendants, passengers, ferry crews, first responders, and ordinary people helping one another.

Under pressure, people often rise to the occasion.

Not everyone does. Some panic. Some freeze. Dick remembers one passenger trying to retrieve a suitcase from an overhead bin during the evacuation and being immediately shouted down by the people around him.

Even that moment revealed something about groups under pressure: they can become self-governing. When the stakes are obvious, people often recognize quickly what behavior helps everyone and what behavior puts the group at risk.

What Do We Take With Us?

The conversation then moved from an aircraft emergency to a very different kind of crisis: organizational change.

Dick shared a story from IBM during a period of major restructuring. An old division was being dissolved and absorbed into another part of the company. Employees were distressed. Their jobs, identity, culture, knowledge, and sense of belonging were all being disrupted.

One executive understood that simply announcing the new structure would not be enough.

He gathered around seventy-five IBM employees at a hotel and led them onto the lawn.

There, a hole had been dug.

The executive brought out a box and began placing objects into it that represented the life of the old division: symbols of the money they had made, innovations they had created, and the work they were proud of.

Then they buried it. Everyone was invited to add a little dirt. Afterward, the group went inside, where food and drink were waiting, and they spent the evening telling stories about the organization they were leaving behind. The instruction was clear: tonight, remember. Tomorrow, build.

Dick was struck by the deliberate use of ritual and storytelling. The leader was not pretending the past had not mattered. He was creating a structured space in which people could acknowledge what was ending, celebrate it, grieve it, and then decide what was worth carrying forward.

What skills had they developed? What relationships had they built? What had they learned? Which parts of the old culture could help create something better next?

The past was not being erased.

It was being harvested.

Why Ritual Matters in Change

Julienne immediately recognized something familiar in the IBM story: it sounded like an Irish wake.

Jerome heard echoes of traditions from his own French background.

Dick’s larger point was that every culture uses ritual to help people move through transition. Birth, marriage, graduation, death — the major thresholds of life are surrounded by ceremony and story.

We gather. We remember. We mark what has changed.

Organizations often forget this.

A reorganization may be treated as an operational event rather than a human one. A new structure appears in a slide deck. Reporting lines change. New goals are announced. Everyone is expected to move forward.

But people may still be grieving what came before.

Ritual creates an intentional boundary between one chapter and another.

That intention matters. A ritual requires time, place, gathering, and attention. It tells people that what they experienced was real enough to acknowledge.

Storytelling then becomes the bridge.

By telling stories about the past, people can decide what belongs in the future.

Stories Do Not Only Describe the Past

This led Jerome to ask an important question: if storytelling is usually associated with what has already happened, how can it help create the future?

Dick pointed to some of the most memorable speeches in history.

The power of a future story is that it gives people something they can see.

A leader does not simply announce that the organization will become “world class.” Dick has little patience for language like that because it is too abstract to mean much.

A useful vision is concrete.

What will customers experience? How will people behave? What will be different? What will we do when a specific situation occurs?

The strongest leaders often connect the past, present, and future in a single narrative. They remind people of where they came from, explain the reality of where they are now, and create a vivid picture of where they could go next.

Then they make the behavior required to reach that future equally clear.

Story turns vision into something people can picture.

And when people can picture it, they have a better chance of acting toward it.

The Whole Person Comes to Work

Julienne brought the conversation back to another kind of organizational response to crisis.

She remembered working in Connecticut after September 11 and watching colleagues try to process what had happened. Many were deeply connected to New York and New Jersey. Some were still seeing cars left in train station parking lots by people who would never return to them.

Yet within days, the organization seemed to revert to business as usual. That disconnect stayed with her. Dick believes many organizations make a fundamental mistake when they imagine employees have a personal life and a work life that should never touch.

“The whole person comes to work,” he said, “and the whole person goes home.”

A major event in someone’s family, health, community, or country does not disappear because they walk into an office. Leaders who pretend otherwise may keep the machinery running for a while, but they risk losing trust and eventually losing people. Acknowledgement is not a distraction from leadership. It is part of leadership.

The Everyday Crisis

The conversation eventually returned to Dick’s current work. Not every crisis is an aircraft landing on a river or a historic global event. For most people, crisis arrives in more ordinary but deeply personal forms: losing a job, experiencing divorce, receiving frightening medical news, facing financial trouble, or watching an important relationship fall apart. Dick is particularly interested in how men respond to these moments.

His observation, supported in part by research and his own experience in men’s groups, is that many men still default to some version of “tough it out.” They try to suppress what is happening, work harder, or avoid asking for help. Others, particularly younger men who have not yet accumulated many experiences of surviving difficulty, may simply shut down.

Dick is writing a book intended to offer something extremely practical in response.

The working title is FUBAR. His idea is deliberately not to create a therapy book, but something closer to a field manual. When life falls apart, what do you do first? What do you do next? How do you break an overwhelming situation into manageable actions?

Because sometimes, before insight can arrive, we need behavior.

Behavior Can Lead Thought

Dick illustrated this with a story from a visit to a Buddhist monastery near Hong Kong.

After climbing a thousand steps to reach the Temple of a Thousand Buddhas, he noticed a group of monks who had been praying throughout his visit.

At the end of the tour, Dick asked the head of the monastery a question. Were the monks really praying the entire time, he wondered, or did their minds wander to things like lunch?

The response surprised him.

That, the monk told him, was a very Western question. Western thinking often assumes behavior follows thought. First we believe or understand something, then we behave accordingly. The monk offered the reverse. Thought can follow behavior. If someone performs the act of prayer consistently, the understanding of prayer may emerge through the practice itself. That idea sits at the heart of Dick’s approach to crisis.

If you can behave calmly before you feel calm, take one useful step before you understand the whole situation, put someone else first, or divide an enormous problem into smaller ones, those actions begin teaching you something about who you are.

You discover that you can handle difficulty because you have just handled it.

Then that experience becomes available the next time.

Ten Seconds Longer

At the end of the conversation, Dick returned to the lesson that has followed him across his work in leadership, crisis, decision-making, and organizational change.

We are more capable than we think we are. When stress arrives, there is often a brief window in which fear, emotion, and confusion threaten to take over. But if we can remain calm just a little longer, something else becomes possible.

Dick recalled a definition of courage he attributes to Margaret Mead: the courageous person is the one who stays calm ten seconds longer than everyone else. Whether the crisis is extraordinary or everyday, those extra seconds matter. They give the rational mind time to catch up. They give us time to see the next step. They give us the opportunity to help someone else.

Leadership under pressure is rarely about having every answer ready in advance. It is about staying present long enough to find the next useful action.

And sometimes, ten seconds is enough to begin.

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