Pressure performance: what do you wish someone had told you in your first crisis?

ER analog: the moment you recognize you don't have a stable mental model of what's going on, stop doing things and rebuild the model. The temptation is to keep acting because action feels productive. Action without a model is how you compound a bad outcome.

Distributed systems analog: when the system starts behaving in ways your runbook doesn't cover, stop following the runbook. Almost every catastrophic outage I've watched escalated because someone executed step 4 of a runbook in a state where steps 1-3 hadn't actually completed.

Risk consulting equivalent: when the model and the data disagree, almost always trust the data. The number of organizations I've seen rationalize away anomalous data because "the model says X" is alarming.