This idea from Ron Ashkenas, managing partner of Schaffer Consulting and author of several books on organization management, takes the experience of a crisis and puts it to work in less trying situations.

1) Organize a post-crisis learning clinic. Include the key people who were involved—from your team, other parts of your organization, and even outside parties. Take stock of what you learned: What was done differently? What new patterns or innovations were sparked by the crisis? And most importantly, what new ways of working—individually or collectively—should be continued?

2) Identify a critical initiative that you want to accelerate. Carve out a stretch goal that will demonstrate progress in 100 days or less—and then consciously apply one or more of the new patterns to it. Use the next 100 days as a real-time experiment to build the new innovations into your team’s muscle memory, while also generating additional learning from the 100-day challenge.

Crises create new working patterns spontaneously—but without conscious effort, these innovations cannot be sustained. To counter this lost opportunity, managers need to extract lessons from the crisis experience and then continue the learning process through a series of short-term challenges.

Source: Harvard Business Review