Episode 52

The Anniversary Emergency: CrowdStrike, Continuity & a Giveaway

A single line of flawed code grounded planes, shuttered hospitals, and crashed cash registers… What would your business do if the emergency was already underway?

One year after launching this podcast in the middle of real-life chaos, Maartje breaks down the CrowdStrike debacle that exposed just how fragile even the biggest systems can be, and why most business continuity plans still fall short. She shares five hard-earned lessons from the outage, including how American Airlines recovered faster than Delta, what crisis readiness really requires, and why your frontline team, not your tech stack, might be the biggest variable in an emergency.

To celebrate The Business Emergency Room podcast’s anniversary, Maartje is giving away a full continuity plan upgrade package (worth over $5,000) to one lucky listener, plus a free checklist for everyone who enters. If your business continuity plan hasn’t been stress-tested lately, this is your chance!

Episode Breakdown:

00:00 One-Year Anniversary of The Business Emergency Room

03:34 The CrowdStrike Outage That Brought Global Systems Down

07:21 How Airlines Responded and What Set Them Apart

10:15 Five Leadership Lessons for Crisis and Continuity

19:42 $5K Business Continuity Giveaway Announcement

24:07 How to Enter and What You’ll Receive

26:16 What This Year Taught Us About Leading Through Chaos

Links

Connect with Maartje van Krieken:

https://www.thechaosgamesconsulting.com/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/maartje/

https://maartjeturnschaosaround.substack.com/

Host Maartje van Krieken is a crisis strategist and decision-making expert who thrives in high-stakes business environments. Combining disaster management training, hands-on experience in global industries, and leadership skills honed as a seasoned sailor, she helps businesses navigate chaos with precision. Whether tackling transformation, scaling challenges, or leadership bottlenecks, Maartje delivers actionable insights to turn turbulence into traction. 

Podcast production and show notes provided by HiveCast.fm

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About the Podcast

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The Business Emergency Room Podcast
Triage, Tools & Tactics to recover from or prevent business chaos in this VUCA business environment

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About your host

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Maartje van Krieken

Maartje van Krieken is a crisis strategist, executive consultant, and your at host of The Business Emergency Room podcast, where growing businesses go when things get messy. With a career that began in frontier oil and gas and spanned war zones, boardrooms, and billion-dollar pivots, Maartje has spent over two decades helping organizations steer through chaos and come out stronger.
Now through her consulting firm, The Chaos Games, Maartje works with medium-sized businesses, especially those scaling rapidly or navigating uncertainty, to diagnose breakdowns in leadership, collaboration, and decision-making before they become business emergencies. Her signature approach blends practical triage, people-first strategy, and blunt Dutch honesty to help teams realign fast.

​The Business Emergency Room delivers high-impact insights for business leaders, board members, and investors who are tired of the symptoms, disconnection, friction, paralysis, and want the tools to fix what’s really going wrong. Maartje’s episodes cut through fluff with stories, frameworks, and metaphors that turn even the most complex chaos into something leaders can act on.
Maartje is based in New Orleans and speaks regularly on navigating organizational storms, building business resilience, and turning reactive firefighting into proactive leadership. Whether you’re scaling a business, running a team, or dealing with dysfunction, The Business Emergency Room is the place to find straight talk and smarter tools.