One of the most challenging aspects of crisis leadership is knowing how to think. We often know what to do, but real leadership lies in framing a crisis and our response to it, for ourselves and for the teams we lead. Leading by framing allows people to make meaning of what is happening to them, to make decisions about how they respond, and to prepare for the future with purpose.

When shelter in place was instituted in San Francisco, the leadership team at French American International School needed a framework for the challenges we were facing, the actions we needed to take, and the planning we needed to do. Framing this work with “now, next, and later” allowed us to categorize and sort the issues facing us, implement our Remote Learning Plan, and establish a communications cycle for our community and a meeting cycle for our faculty. Now, we needed to take our bilingual international school of over 1,000 students, over 800 families, over 200 educators online. Next, we needed to think about the admissions and advancement events scheduled for the weeks right after closure. And we needed to create space in our leadership and Board meetings later — for the implications of this unprecedented situation on our budget, hiring, marketing, and programming next year.

As the days and now weeks of shelter in place have continued, we have moved forward with this framework. What was now a few weeks ago is past, and what was next is now. Because we have a conceptual model that allows us to toggle among the many issues involved in this crisis, we’ve been able to work through them effectively, meeting both immediate concerns and long-term challenges. We’ve shared this model with our school community, so families see how we are thinking across the scope of this experience. While nothing about COVID-19 has been easy, we’ve been helped by having a shared framework for our efforts now, next, and later.