What the Hell Happened (and what can I do about it?)
Something happened this week that changed the conditions your organization is operating in. Most leaders will find out too late.
What the Hell Happened? is a weekly 30-minute briefing for executives in healthcare, higher education, manufacturing, logistics, transportation, and construction. Every episode takes the week's most consequential events — policy shifts, system failures, supply chain disruptions, regulatory changes — and works through what they mean for the people making decisions at the top.
Three segments. Every episode.
Readiness — what happened and why it matters. Resilience — what it reveals about the assumptions your organization is running on. Advantage — one specific action before Monday.
Hosted by Mike McCracken, founder of Southwind Planning Solutions, with decades at the intersection of emergency management and private sector operations.
What the Hell Happened (and what can I do about it?)
Latest Episodes
Episode 7: Trading Blind: Unknown Is Not A Status
On May 18, 2012, Facebook went public, and Nasdaq expected the opening to produce the largest IPO order volume in its history. What it got instead was a system that couldn't finish calculating the opening price. Engineers pushed through an unte...
Episode 6: The System Didn't Fail
On a July evening in 2024, a piece of equipment failed on a transmission line in Northern Virginia. The grid's protection system responded correctly. So did the protection systems inside a cluster of nearby data centers. Within 82 seconds, r...
The Platform Everyone Trusted
Nothing about the Homeland Security Information Network ever looked broken. Alerts kept going out. Information kept flowing. That's what made it dangerous.In this episode, Mike breaks down the HSIN breach — discovered in early July after...