What No One Tells You About Building Systems Mid-Crisis

Alexis Goodreau
Jul 15
3 min read

Elegant room with green walls and gold accents. A chair and table with a laptop sit below a glowing wall square. Sunlight casts shadows.

Why the best systems get built in a mess.

It’s easy to imagine what building strong systems looks like: a clear runway, a calm team, the luxury of time to map and iterate. That’s the fantasy. And for most founders? That’s never how it starts. Instead systems get built in motion. Processes mapped out mid-launch. Team check-ins scheduled post-burnout. Everything on the heels of a cash flow panic or a team shakeup. Not because it’s ideal, but because it’s necessary.

And here’s the part that doesn’t get said often enough: that kind of systems work - the duct-taped, decision-fatigued, just-in-time kind - is still deeply valid. Strategic, even. Not just a placeholder until something better comes along.

The Fantasy vs. The Reality

The idealized version of operations work is clean and color-coded. SOPs built before the first client. Airtable bases that anticipate everything. But most small businesses don’t build that way.

Only 49% of U.S. companies report having a formal crisis plan. And among those fewer than a quarter actively practice it. That gap between theory and readiness? It shows up fast when pressure hits.

And under pressure perfectionism doesn’t help you or your team. Research shows self-oriented perfectionism has risen significantly over the last few decades - and so has burnout. Perfectionist expectations might look like high standards, but in a crisis, they stall momentum.

How to Build Systems in Business (When You’re in a Crisis)

Real systems built mid-crisis aren’t polished. They’re functional. Often held together by Google Sheets, Slack threads, and institutional memory. They prioritize what matters now, not someday.

Frameworks like triage models (red/yellow/green) or the Incident Command System come from emergency response, and they work. In a small business that might mean shifting launches based on cash flow realities or tagging team updates by urgency. It’s not glamorous, but it keeps things moving forward.

Minimum viable systems follow the same logic. Start with the core functionality. Deliver stability fast. Iterate when things calm down.

The Weight of Building While Holding Everything

Crisis mode doesn’t just drain capacity - it messes with clarity. Decision fatigue creeps in. Strategic thinking narrows. You start reacting, not building.

Research backs this up: under high cognitive load, decision quality drops. People default to what’s easiest, not what’s best. That’s not a personal failing. It’s a brain thing.

This is where light structure helps. Tools like OKRs or even simple “Go/No-Go/Wait” choices reduce load and preserve capacity for the decisions that actually matter.

Trade-offs Are the Strategy

In a perfect world you’d fix everything, but mid-crisis, trade-offs are the strategy. You choose what to stabilize first. You let nonessentials slide.

This isn’t about settling. It’s about sequencing. MVP thinking applies to backend systems too: what’s the smallest version of this process that can work right now?

And more importantly: what’s draining you that doesn’t need to?

Building Adaptive (Not Perfect) Systems

The goal isn’t to finish. It’s to keep evolving. Adaptive systems respond to pressure. They shift with you. That’s resilience.

Chaos engineering (used by companies like Netflix) tests systems by breaking them on purpose to see where they hold and where they don’t. Not to punish, but to learn. In a small team this might look like stress-testing your client onboarding by having someone new follow the steps without help. You’ll learn a lot, fast.

You don’t need to simulate failure. You’re living it. But you can treat this phase as data. Every workaround, every breakdown is information you can build from.

A Simple Framework for Crisis System Building

Red (Critical) - What breaks the business if left unresolved? Fix it now.

Yellow (Urgent) - What’s causing friction but still functioning? Triage this next.

Green (Supportive) - What can wait? Schedule or shelve it until capacity opens up.

Pair that with a few mental load reducers:

Daily decisions? Standardize what you can.
Priorities? Name the top three and let the rest be background noise.
Tools? Use what’s already working. Skip the shiny new system for now.

If you’re building systems mid-crisis, you’re not behind. You’re just building in real life, with real constraints. And what you build now might not be pretty. But it will be lived in. Yours. Strong in ways that polished systems rarely are.

Let it be messy. Let it hold. You can refine later. For now you’re doing the real work.

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