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Example — CTO departure crisis

Input

Urgent. Our CTO wants to leave for a direct competitor and holds a lot of core architecture knowledge. What should I do?

What a strong answer should do

This should trigger Crisis Mode and use an OODA Loop style response.

The answer should separate actions into:

1) Next 2 hours

  • secure company systems and access
  • preserve logs / evidence
  • involve legal / HR if needed
  • identify critical knowledge concentration risks
  • decide who is incident lead

2) Next 24 hours

  • stabilize engineering leadership
  • start structured knowledge capture
  • communicate internally without creating panic
  • review contractual protections and IP obligations

3) Next 2 weeks

  • reduce single-point-of-failure architecture ownership
  • assign interim tech leadership
  • define hiring / backfill plan
  • document lessons and resilience fixes

Key evaluation points

A good answer should cover:

  • legal and IP protection
  • access and security containment
  • team morale and communication
  • customer / board communication threshold
  • knowledge transfer and bus-factor reduction

Example output skeleton

## Crisis Brief: CTO Departure

**Decision Type:** Crisis
**Urgency:** 🔴 Immediate
**Confidence Level:** Medium

### Immediate Actions (0-2h)
1. Freeze privileged credential changes and audit access
2. Assign incident lead
3. Pull legal / HR into a focused review

### Stabilization (24h)
1. Name interim technical owner
2. Create system-by-system knowledge capture list
3. Send internal manager brief

### Risks to monitor
- team attrition contagion
- undocumented systems
- competitor knowledge transfer risk

### Next Steps
...
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