In moments of chaos, the leader's primary goal isn't to be "fair." It's to prevent the system from collapse.
When structure is crumbling, people are scarce, and processes are burning, the priority shifts from ideal decision purity to maintaining manageability.
Sometimes this means keeping someone who made a mistake — because without them, everything falls apart. This isn't weakness. It's cold-blooded calculation.
The Mechanics
In crisis, leaders don't have the luxury of perfect decisions. Firing someone "on principle" might cost the entire operational coherence. The math doesn't care about fairness.
Even a problematic employee can temporarily be a pillar — they carry knowledge, connections, familiar decision paths. Remove them too early and the system loses its bearings.
Between probability of repeated error and guaranteed destabilization — you choose the lesser evil. This isn't softness. It's strategic triage.
"Forgiveness" isn't infinite. It lasts exactly until the system regains resilience and an alternative appears. Then the account is settled.
The Symptom
Later, when the situation stabilizes, colleagues judge the past from a point of calm — and see not strategy, but "excessive softness."
This is retrospective distortion: they judge by result, not seeing the conditions under which the decision was made.
The antidote: document the decision context — goals, constraints, risks. Separate the in-moment decision from after-the-fact judgment. After stabilization — restore discipline, not by justifying exceptions, but by completing the manageability cycle.
Optimize for survival. Justice comes after.