While last year’s earthquake in Haiti brought indescribable devastation and horror, it also demonstrated the incredible ability and willingness of individuals and organisations to respond to a crisis. People from around the world – most with no connection to Haiti – donated time, expertise, money, resources and support.
This kind of response is neither unusual nor confined to natural disasters. Almost everyone has experienced a personal or organisational crisis that has triggered a 'Battle of Britain' spirit and extraordinary achievement, so what is it about critical events that causes us to raise our levels of performance, and how can corporate and governmental bodies systematically learn from these situations?
Having looked at crisis dynamics for many years, three factors always appear: urgency, empathy and innovation. 'Urgency' is the realisation that time matters, that there are clear goals and clearer consequences if they aren't achieved quickly. 'Empathy' is the identification people feel with the crisis, the sense that we're connected and that some day we could be in the same situation, and would want others to help us. 'Innovation' is the freedom to respond in ways that are out of the ordinary, that don’t get caught up in red tape, approvals and complex decision-making.
Whenever these three 'zest' factors are present, individuals and organisations tend to raise their game – as we saw with Haiti. Unfortunately, when the event passes, these factors also fade. One year on, state and federal agencies in the US are bickering about who is going to pay for airlifts and medical support. Red tape has slowed down or stopped orphan adoptions, donated funds have gone unspent and the general public has lost interest. In other words, the world's focus on Haiti has gone back to normal, even though the needs of its people are still far beyond ordinary.
The return to a normal level of performance after a crisis is understandable, even if it is disappointing. It's difficult to sustain the intensity of a crisis response over a long period of time; people 'crash' after the adrenaline rush, or become exhausted. Organisations also become weary, because day-to-day business and the needs of other customers, employees, suppliers and shareholders continue unabated during a crisis. It's difficult to divert attention from these without creating a backlog that, itself, could become another crisis.
It needn't be inevitable, however, that individuals and organisations slide back to pre-crisis performance. If they can openly and honestly capture and incorporate the lessons learnt from the crisis, it's often possible to apply them to ongoing business in a way that creates a 'new normal' at a higher level. For example, 600 managers operated a petro-chemical plant for four months after a wildcat strike by its 2,700 employees. Beforehand, the same managers had complained that they didn't have enough resources to run the plant effectively. Based on what was learnt during the strike, the management team reconfigured roles, responsibilities, training, management information and accountabilities so that the 'new normal' for running the refinery included a reduced staff complement – between 1,600 and 1,100 fewer staff members.
If you want to capitalise on a crisis in your organisation by creating a 'new normal', you need toconduct quickly a thorough postmortem of the crisis response, before memories fade and everyone falls back into old working patterns. It needs to cover (a) the crisis response itself, and (b) the operational and cultural changes that were triggered by the crisis.
Assessing crisis response is standard procedure in many organisations, equivalent to an after-action review in the Military. Here the focus is on preparedness and how to be ready for a future crisis: Was there a 'command centre' or management process in place that was activated appropriately? Were the right people mobilised quickly, and did they know what they needed to do? Were communications and information systems handled effectively? Changes to emergency procedures, back-up systems and other 'just-in-case' mechanisms can then be made, based on the answers.
The second focus of the postmortem – operational and cultural changes – is more difficult to assess, and often ignored. The main question here is what was done during the crisis that should be continued and built into the way we work: Which innovative procedures or changes to processes were utilised? In what ways were people treated differently? How did managers and others change their behaviour in order to trigger the 'zest' factors? Digging into this topic requires individual and group discussions with both managers and other crisis participants. And since it might be threatening to some (e.g. “My manager asked for my opinion instead of telling me what to do”), it's often useful to have a third party conduct the assessment and help management apply the findings.
Nobody welcomes a crisis, but imagine how much better our organisations could perform if each 'business quake' created a vibrant new business landscape.
Ron Ashkenas is a senior partner of Schaffer Consulting, a Stamford, Connecticut, consulting firm, and the author of the book Simply Effective: How to Cut Through Complexity in Your Organization and Get Things Done
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