Instead of making decisions based on circumstances, choose a principle that will be your guiding star, and make decisions based on it.

In Airbnb's case, Brian knew that by overwriting hosts' cancelation policy to return money to his guests was going to be a big challenge, but choose "health and safety" as the guiding principle had enabled him to justify it as the right path forward.

To smooth out the impact, Airbnb then ended up using their cash on hand to partially reimburse the hosts who lost out on income.