I learned this the hard way, not in a boardroom but on a Tuesday night in a cramped coworking space in Bangsar. A founder I’d been mentoring had just swept the whiteboard clean after yet another pivot meeting. The roadmap looked tidy again, but the team did not. They were tired, jumpy, and waiting for the next surprise they couldn’t control. That’s when it clicked for me: we weren’t facing a one-off shock; we were living inside sustained change. You don’t outthink that environment. You out-train it. If you want to survive sustained change, you start rehearsing.
Rehearsal is not a workshop. It’s a practice. In sports, teams don’t wait for game day to discover their communication gaps. In aviation, crews don’t count on “being good under pressure.” They drill. Startups, especially in Southeast Asia and the Gulf where regulation, payments infrastructure, and procurement cycles can shift overnight, often rely on grit and heroic effort. That works once. Then it breaks the second time, and the team starts to fear the calendar. Rehearsal removes the mystery around volatility. It turns “What if?” into “When this happens, here’s how we move.”
The first time I ran a change rehearsal with a team in KL, we kept it simple. We picked one destabilizer and set a clock. A key vendor fails an audit. A major customer delays payment for sixty days. A regulator updates KYC thresholds mid-quarter. No slides, no grandstanding. Just a table, the people who actually do the work, and an hour that didn’t belong to anyone else’s agenda. We mapped the immediate actions, the communication chain, and—this is the part most teams skip—the decision that would be hardest to make because it would feel disloyal to our original plan.
That hour changed the mood more than any “all-hands pep talk” I’ve seen. Not because we invented a perfect solution. Because the team saw themselves move through uncertainty without waiting for permission. Anxiety often comes from unmade decisions. Rehearsal forces a decision into the open before real money or reputation is at stake. The CTO found out which part of the stack was a single point of failure. The finance lead realized we didn’t have clarity on who could authorize an emergency spend. The head of sales admitted she had been shielding bad news to “protect morale,” which of course was doing the opposite.
When I took a version of this into a women-led cohort in Riyadh, we added cultural and calendar realities into the script. Ramadan was coming; energy patterns would change and customer behavior would compress into shorter windows. Instead of trying to “power through,” the team rehearsed shorter, sharper handoffs and wrote a decision rule: if a task cannot be completed within the agreed focus window, it gets parked without guilt and escalated by default, not by exception. Rehearsal let them redesign their rhythm rather than apologize for it.
The founder’s role in rehearsal is to direct, not to dominate. If you jump in to solve every bottleneck, the team will look to you like a lighthouse and then blame you when the fog returns. Set the frame, hold the clock, and ask the questions that expose invisible assumptions. Who owns this if you’re on a plane? What is the last responsible moment to decide? What is the smallest reversible action we can take now that makes future options cheaper, not more expensive? You are pulling truth to the surface, not performing competence.
Rehearsal works best when you anchor it to three elements: a script, a stage, and signals. The script is the minimal storyline of the stressor, with just enough detail to avoid hand-waving. The stage is the time-boxed container where normal hierarchy softens and reality is allowed to interrupt optimism. The signals are the pre-agreed cues that move people, not just tasks: when finance says “amber,” engineering doesn’t argue; they pause deployments; when customer success logs “pattern,” sales stops promising a fix by Friday. You can’t improvise signals in a crisis. You practice them until they become muscle memory.
Most teams resist rehearsal at first because they think it will slow them down or drain morale. In my experience, performative speed drains morale far more. What actually slows a startup isn’t a rehearsal. It’s the repeated rediscovery of the same fragility under slightly different conditions. When you rehearse, you spend one hour to save ten. You also unlock quieter benefits: junior operators learn how decisions get made; cross-functional respect grows because people finally see the tradeoffs outside their lane; and leadership spots where “culture” is doing the heavy lifting that a simple rule should handle.
There are traps. A common one is turning rehearsal into theater. If everybody already knows the ending, you’re just confirming status. Another trap is complexity creep. The point isn’t to model the entire economy; it’s to surface your next two weak links. The third trap is treating rehearsal as a one-off after a scare. That’s not practice. That’s a reaction. Put it on the calendar. Tie it to real events: after a big launch, before a seasonal peak, two weeks into a new compliance rule. Give it a name your team won’t roll their eyes at. “Wednesday drills” will do. Consistency builds safety; safety builds honesty; honesty builds speed.
I often get asked what to rehearse if you don’t know what’s coming. That’s the wrong question. You already know your likely stressors, even if you haven’t written them down. Cash squeeze. Platform dependency. Supplier concentration. Key person risk. Decision latency. Pick one. Then run the smallest possible version of the storm. Pretend your payments processor is down for a day. Pretend your lead PM is unreachable for forty-eight hours. Pretend two enterprise clients ask for six-month payment terms at the same time. Watch what gets loud, and watch what goes worryingly quiet. Your job is to listen for the silence.
A team I advised in Singapore used rehearsal to finally face their real issue: nobody wanted to say that the new enterprise product was underbaked. In status meetings, everyone danced around it because the story was that moving upmarket would “stabilize revenue.” In rehearsal, when they ran a “pilot stalls” scenario, the infrastructure lead admitted they were hand-stitching custom features for every prospect. The founder’s face fell, then softened. In the debrief, she made two calls that had been haunting her for months: she paused new enterprise demos and refocused product on a narrower, winnable segment. Rehearsal didn’t create that clarity. It gave her the context and courage to act on it before the market did it for her.
If you’re running a young team in Kuala Lumpur, Dubai, or Jeddah, you’re already navigating layered realities: customers who still prefer WhatsApp to ticketing systems, banks that don’t integrate as promised, procurement cycles that move in fits and starts. You cannot fix those macro rhythms. You can decide how your team responds to them. Rehearsal is how you turn external volatility into internal confidence. It tells your people, “We don’t need to predict everything. We need to be ready to move when it happens.”
Here’s the part I wish I had learned earlier in my own founder journey. Rehearsal is not about proving you’re strong. It’s about designing your team so strength isn’t the only way through. When you practice the hard moves in ordinary time, you reduce the demand on heroics in extraordinary time. You create slack on purpose. You choose to make decisions when your nervous system is calm and your calendar is forgiving, not when everything is on fire and the loudest voice wins by default.
If I had to start again, I would schedule change rehearsals as soon as I hired my first five people. I would write decision rules while we still liked each other and the stakes felt small. I would normalize saying, “We don’t know yet—so here’s our next reversible step,” and reward the teammate who surfaces the uncomfortable truth before it becomes an expensive one. That is not caution. That is leadership.
Treat rehearsal like you treat code reviews, retros, and one-on-ones: a non-negotiable part of how the team stays honest and stays fast. Let it be boring. Let it be simple. Let it be regular enough that nobody confuses adrenaline with progress. The companies that ride out long seasons of change aren’t the bravest or the luckiest. They’re the ones who built readiness into the week and made adaptability ordinary. You can do the same. And when the day comes that the ground moves again—as it will—you won’t be surprised by your team’s response. You’ll recognize it. You practiced it.
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