"Houston we have had a problem"... When the folks at Mission Control heard that call for help from the Apollo 13 crew everything stop, a pall of silence fell over the place, and then the flight director, Gene Kranz, stood up and announced to everyone in room that "the mission has changed". The new mission was to bring three humans back to mother Earth safe and sound. He added later his famous words "failure is not an option."
Back in the day, I ran a crisis team that was responsible for the continuation of a company or its extinction. Each and everyday I had the team recall the Apollo 13 experience and map it onto their real life situation. At our early morning meetings I had a quote drawn from NASA and one that represent our challenge for that day emphasised in black pen marker on a big whiteboard. At the top of the whiteboard was the heading "failure is not an option". After 6 weeks of this one senior executive pulled me aside and whispered in my ear "you really believe we can do this don't you".
Managing through a crisis is not something we are skilled at, practiced in, or perhaps ever wish to become experience in handling. But. The year 2020 has taught us all to respect the presence of a crisis and to disrespect those who treat it as merely "business as usual". The obvious fact to all of us is that managing through a crisis is a skill that most of the 7 billion people on Earth must become more capable of doing.
Here are some simple strategies and tactics that you may wish to practice.
Create a team of 3 to 5 key people. Bind onto them the human talent you will need to get the job done. NASA starts each new venture with a core team of three people.
Lock your core team away for a night or two or more in the first instance and brainstorm inventive and innovative ways to do things that have never been tried before. Beta test the best of these ideas on a small scale. Apollo 13 beta tested in real time the crazy device that enabled them to breath. They beta tested using the landing module as their primary spacecraft. And so on.
Avoid the pressure mounting from the "business as usual" mob who will always urge you to spend time on "workarounds" to buy time. A good example of a workaround is the year 2020 practice of "lockdowns that have paralysed most of the global economy".
Be brutal about being transparent, honest, and accountable. This is not what political leaders do in a crisis and that is the key reason that the Coronavirus pandemic is still raging.
Use science and technology but never become the handmaiden to the people who have such expertise [many of them become hubris filled fools]. A crisis does not recognise nor respect a scientist nor a technologist.
Clear from you mind memes such as "a crisis is both a threat and an opportunity". Instead think of a crisis as time of discontinuity, uncertainty, and ambiguity. It is a time when humans either learn quickly or perish.
Leverage the talent you have in your crisis management hub with network links to expertise all around the globe. Gene Kranz and his NASA team even had Soviet experts working on various aspects of the mission to save the lives of three humans who became stranded in Open Space for three days.
Finally, you know that you are living through a crisis when time stands still, minutes runs slower and slower, counting in day becomes irrelevant, and the speed with which you can correct simple errors becomes paramount [see photo].
Richard
Newminimalism provides me with a set of tools to manage through a crisis. You can become a Newminimalist in just 10 days. Go to the homepage of my website minimal-you.com for a free three-step process to help you unveil your unique version of minimal-you.
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