Imagine being Lehman CEO Richard Fuld Jr., testifying in front of a hostile crowd at a House committee and being told, “If you haven’t discovered your role, you are the villain today.”

Here’s a technique for making sure you never wind up in such a hot seat, one that can also be used to diminish the possibility of any sort of public relations debacle:

Collect every bit of press coverage of the Lehman mess. At the first sign that your company or industry might be headed toward problems that could make news, take out the Lehman coverage and use it to remind yourself of how actions that seem plausible from inside a company can look surreal from an outsider’s perspective. Then have someone comb through your files looking for all the “gotcha” documents that congressmen, lawyers and reporters could use later to show that a problem was more serious than you let on in public. Have someone use those documents to write a mock front-page piece for the Wall Street Journal that could appear six months or so down the road and that puts the worst possible spin on your actions–along the lines of the pieces that say Fuld earned $480 million in compensation while running Lehman into the ground and deceiving the public about its difficulties. Don’t try to be fair. Make the piece as vindictive as possible.

This technique is drawn from a question we pose to readers in “Billion Dollar Lessons” about their strategies: “Can it withstand sunshine?” Look at business decisions not just from the standpoint of whether they are legal but also whether they are reasonable and ethical in the light of day and in full view of investors, regulators, and the general public. You may not change any of your plans. But, then again, maybe you’ll temper them. In any case, you won’t be blindsided the way Fuld was when he went before Congress.

Fuld’s problem was that he couldn’t get outside the four walls of the firm. It was perfectly rational to insiders to give a fired executive $2 million in severance because that’s how things had always been done–so what if the firm is about to go out of business? It made sense to Fuld to live up to a contractual obligation and give another executive $16.2 million in severance, even as investors were about to be wiped out. Fuld was unapologetic about earning $480 million because that’s the kind of money his peers on Wall Street received. (He said his earnings were more like $350 million because a drop in Lehman’s stock price pretty much wiped out a year’s compensation, but he somehow didn’t get much sympathy.)

At some level, everything Fuld did made sense. But he might have acted differently if he’d known how greedy he and his fellow executives would seem.

There’s obviously considerable use of hindsight in what we’re writing. Six months ago, Fuld thought Lehman would weather the storm and that any indiscretions about pay or disclosure would fade. Still, trouble on Wall Street had been brewing for several quarters, and there were Cassandras out there saying the mortgage bubble was going to burst and savage investors. So, to be prudent, Lehman should have been reviewing its actions in the harsh light of potentially nasty publicity.

Because he didn’t, Fuld had to face the full blast of congressional and public scorn this week. It would behoove others to avoid repeating his mistake.