In 2017, ask what can't happen. Then plan for it...

As the dust settles on the Oscars car crash at the Dolby Theater on Sunday night, there are some valuable lessons for any corporation if they are interested to look.

In case you have been on a deserted island for the last 48 hours, accounting firm PWC supposedly mixed up Oscar winner envelopes and La La Land was mistakenly named Best Film instead of Moonlight. So far, so bad.

But it gets worse.

Media reports today are suggesting that the PWC partner in charge was very busy tweeting pictures of the stars backstage. So busy in fact, that he tweeted a picture of Emma Stone just a few seconds before envelope-gate. Oh dear, oh dear.

Rather than ask the obvious question of "how could this happen?" (it doesn't matter now - it did), businesses would be advised to ask "what's our La La Land?" What can't happen to us? What's impossible?

I guarantee you, if you or I had walked into the PWC boardroom in Los Angeles on the Friday before the Oscars Sunday and presented what actually happened as a scenario, we would have been laughed out of the room.

The following phrases might have followed us out of the building. "We have been doing this for 83 years." "There cannot be a mistake." "It's impossible for the envelopes to be mixed up." Etc.

So what are the La La Land pointers for business post-Oscars?

1. Be nervous when someone tells you something is impossible or cannot happen. Their position is usually defensive and rarely objective.
2. Think like a scriptwriter, not a risk manager. Ditch your insipid enterprise risk management chart. Write a horror movie or thriller with your company at the center. What does the plot look like?
3. Don't get the home team to do your scenario planning. Please. Get an external firm who has no career or political agenda. Encourage them to upset you and your board with their disrespectful thinking about what might happen to your company.
4. Get comfortable being uncomfortable. We live in strange times. Better plan for them. Get out of whatever comfort zone you may be in as it translates to your company's reputation.
5. Ask yourself what cannot happen. Give yourself permission to think really dumb, stupid things about stuff that could not happen to your company in a million years. Or 83. Once you free yourself of the shackles of permission-based thinking, you'll be amazed how insightful you become.

I feel genuinely bad for the folks at PWC and, of course, they will get through this and prevail. In fact their crisis response so far has been pretty good. But had they just spent a moment being genuinely open to the idea of what could never happen, maybe they would have avoided what did.

Charles Lankester is the Hong Kong-based Global EVP of Reputation & Risk Management at international communications firm Ruder Finn. [email protected]