Interlude 1 Crisis Management

As you progress in your transformation it is almost inevitable that at some point things are going to go sideways on you. The process of transforming and changing organizations is complex and the odds are almost 100% that sooner or later a mistake will occur. And some group of angry people will approach your office with burning torches and pitchforks ready to slay the monster who is making them change. How you handle that situation can have a profound impact on the success of your transformation. To help with that I will lay out the advice I provide to people on crisis management.?

There are usually two parts to the crisis you are managing. The first part is the initial meeting and then the second is the actual root cause analysis and action plan. I will address each one in turn.?

Initial Meeting?

During the first meeting where people are bringing the issue to you, people are going to be passionate about the situation. Usually, the meeting involves a senior person (pretending to be reasonable) and a more junior person (angry). The first and most important thing to do is acknowledge the impact. Whatever happened in the transformation was impactful to the group in front of you regardless of whether it was your team’s fault or not. Validating them up front and showing you understand that they were impacted is critical to moving to the next step.? Accept the impact but not the blame. They were impacted and this situation needs to be resolved so it never happens again.?

The next step is to focus on the solution not the problem. And this is tough because people truly love to focus on the problem. The human brain is hardwired to pump you full of adrenaline when you are faced with a crisis situation. So as people focus repeatedly on rehashing what occurred, their brains are getting little jolts of adrenaline that make them want to just continue focusing there.??

The issue is that outside of a problem that you can solve by hitting something, most problems can’t be solved with anger. To solve the problem you need to focus on the solution. And that means going through exactly what happened, why it happened and how you can change your processes to make sure it never happens again.?

As an aside here sometimes people lack the emotional maturity to distance themselves from the situation and begin to look at the solution. As an operations leader you are the equal partner of the business or product team member in front of you and you have to maintain a respectful relationship with them. If they cannot be respectful, then I would recommend politely ending the meeting and reconvening later when people have calmed down. The last thing you want to do is make the situation even worse by getting into a massive argument or coming off as defensive.??

The other thing I would recommend is not to try and solve the issue in the first meeting. In the initial crises meeting you are just trying to get them calmed down and get a resource commitment to work together to get to root cause and then remediating actions. Trying to get into solutioning in a management meeting is a useless task, the people who know what really happened are unlikely to be there.?

Root Cause and Remediation?

I am not going to try here to lecture people about root cause analysis. There are entire methodologies about it and most of the people reading this article are familiar with them. Instead, I will try to provide some general advice for looking for a solution to the crisis.?

My first piece of advice is that it is at least partially you. You are the transformation leader; your team is driving the change and the crisis emerged on your watch. Trying to prove it is not you is going to make you sound defensive and basically break any progress you have made with the other party.?

The next thing to realize is that it does not really matter who was at fault. Knowing who was at fault is only useful in figuring out what happened but rarely actually fixes the issue. You need to really get down to what part of the overall operations process broke. As I have said about a thousand times, there are no bad people there are only bad processes.??

I will give you an example. Say you have a new resource and that resource turns out to accidentally delete something they should not have. It is easy to get mad and complain about the lack of skill of that resource or the actions of the resource themselves. So, then you go and remove the resource from your team. Problem solved right? Everyone feels great and the crisis has been calmed down.?

The problem is you really did not address the underlying process issue. You should be looking at your hiring process, or what controls were in place to prevent accidental deletions, etc. In my career I have rarely met someone who is truly maliciously trying to break something. Whoever caused the event thought they were doing the right thing or were at least trying their best. What you need to understand is why the surrounding processes allowed the error to occur. Never assume a human is perfect. If your process relies on human perfection you are going to fail. Your processes should have been designed with human failure in mind and should have compensated for it.??

My final piece of advice is that you must follow through and fix the issue. Over-communicating here is critical. You want to work with all the parties involved in the crisis, provide regular updates, and drive the issue to resolution. Making the same mistake again because you did not follow through is going to lose you all credibility. And people assume if you are not updating them that you are not working on the problem. So, if you do not communicate a lot you end up back in the initial crisis meeting, usually with someone even more senior, and the whole crisis process starts over.?

I hope this general advice helped. As always it is my opinion here and I am sure some people will not agree. Please feel free to debate me!?

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