This crucible experience will be career-defining for many leaders. In any crisis—especially a historic global catastrophe in which the main factor is uncertainty— people want leaders to give them information, reassurance, and a plan. Yet this is exactly when all of those are maddeningly difficult to deliver. History says leaders will benefit by following a few principles:

1 REMEMBER THAT PEOPLE WANT TO BE LED.

We understand in our bones the simple efficiency of it, that no group accomplishes much if no one is in charge. In a lifethreatening historic crisis, we want direction more than ever. We also need a leader to be, in effect, a repository for our fears, someone who has the power to do what we cannot. The leader assumes part of our burden and helps us sleep at night. If you’re in charge—be in charge.

2 BE DECISIVE.

In a crisis, even people who would normally be at one another’s throats accept that major decisions must be made quickly. These decisions will be debated—but after they’re made, not before. That’s a valuable opportunity for leaders. The difficulty is that just when decisions are most easily accepted, they’re hardest to make. Every leadership decision is made with incomplete information; in a crisis the problem is worse and the stakes are higher. Don’t let that fact stop you from making firm decisions.

3 DEFINE REALITY AND GIVE HOPE.

People hunger for the unvarnished truth about their organization and its prospects, and they can sense evasion a mile away. The news in a crisis is rarely good. The leader’s art is outlining reality unflinchingly and framing it as a challenge that can be met, not as a disaster that must be endured. Effective leaders never make a promise that can’t be kept with 110% certainty; they do offer realistic reasons for hope. Even these principles will be of limited value to any leader who hasn’t built trust and credibility. You can’t change the past, but a crisis is an excellent time to start changing the future.

Being most influential among all age groups, they are most powerful by far among the young, who increase consumption more during booms and cut back more during busts. They may be living on way, way less for some time.

For two groups of young people—those graduating from high school or college this spring—that’s just the beginning of the dispiriting news. College students who graduate into the labor force during a recession suffer reduced earnings for 10 years on average, and for those with the lowest predicted earnings (based on college and major), the earnings penalty may last much longer. It gets worse. Some research finds that in midlife, recession graduates on average work more and earn less, are less likely to be married and more likely to be childless, and suffer higher death rates. One researcher on this topic, Northwestern University’s Hannes Schwandt, sums up the findings thus: “The bad luck of leaving school during hard times can lead to higher rates of early death and permanent differences in life circumstances.”

If past trends from serious recessions hold true, the pandemic might alter the economy’s structure, diminishing the earning power of the labor force— potentially for years. Lack of funds will force some prospective college students to postpone or abandon their plans. If the recession is long, many of the newly unemployed may remain jobless for many months or even years, during which their skills might deteriorate and become outdated, as happened in the last recession. Even if they get jobs eventually, they may well be less valuable workers.

Apart from its effects on workers’ earnings, the pandemic may do other lasting damage to the labor force as well. If the unlikely worst-case scenarios play out and COVID-19 kills over 100,000 Americans plus millions more worldwide, the simple shrinkage of the labor force would reduce output for years. Even without that extreme circumstance, the same factors that have caused schools to close will significantly curtail early childhood education, a proven factor in better educational achievement later in life.

Researchers have also uncovered an unexpected effect of the 1918 flu pandemic that could potentially recur: It reduced educational attainment by people who hadn’t been born yet. Americans who were born in the months after the pandemic, and thus were in utero during it, were less likely to graduate from high school than the cohorts immediately before and after them. In any long-term economic recovery plan Congress and the White House hammer out, policymakers would be wise to invest in incentives that help young people finish school.

PLANNING FOR THE NEXT CATASTROPHE

As businesses respond to this grand-scale reordering of their world, some implications are already clear. Remote work will become mainstream, if only because so many people will have an online meeting app and know how to use it. Companies are slashing capital spending as they scramble for cash, weakening the foundation of future economic growth while also fueling a B2B doom loop in the present. They’ll diversify supply chains beyond China when demand returns, further slowing that country’s decelerating economy.

As in all recessions, companies will learn to do more with fewer people, so the already spiking unemployment rate may well continue to rise at least briefly after this recession ends.

It’s a safe bet that many companies will compile pandemic plans for the future—surely a wise move, but if that’s all they do, they’ll be missing a crucial lesson of this experience. A global pandemic is the most predicted disaster since Hurricane Katrina, yet, now as then, businesses and governments were caught flat-footed. When the urgency of this calamity abates, it will be time to start thinking through other plausible catastrophes—a major earthquake strikes California; some group or nation detonates a nuclear bomb; a large electrical grid gets hacked and shut down. You’ll never foresee exactly what happens, but the exercise of working out the second- and third-order effects will put you miles ahead of competitors if one of these events occurs. It’s a lot of work. But remember the conclusion of Mohamed El-Erian, CEO of bond trading firm Pimco during the financial crisis: “It’s better to be prepared for events that don’t happen than unprepared for events that do.”

As we look ahead to days that will probably remain challenging, what can be offered to the supremely important, terrified consumer, the hero and victim of this saga? Only hope—based on history. Forecasts of multiplying deaths and unprecedented economic collapse come with percentages and decimal points. Yet human ingenuity, passion, and energy are beyond any economist’s ability to predict, and those are what get us through times of trial. It’s unsatisfying to say that a better future awaits us because of forces and factors that we can’t exactly describe. But we mustn’t forget that it’s true.