Solving complex challenges

Solving complex challenges

Critical takeaways

• As crisis communicators and strategic advisors, our value is in the quality of the decisions we make when faced with complex challenges.?
• These challenges must be approached with the appropriate mindset, supported by a good understanding of those involved and the situation. You can also use specific tools and techniques to help improve the quality of your decision-making?
• Your real value will come from your ability to use an extensive library of patterns you’ve developed and honed over time that will help you ‘see around corners’.

As a strategic crisis communicator and a trusted advisor, you have one product to “sell” to your audience: your decisions. These decisions aren’t small things, like deciding whether the CEO should say they're “sorry” or “very sorry” in a statement. Those are tactical decisions and, I’m afraid to say, most tactical decisions don’t matter very much in the long run.?

The decisions you’re going to be making are much more significant, strategic decisions - like whether to take a proactive stance to get ahead of the story or remain reactive until you can learn more.?

You’ll have to identify the most critical communities and constituents - those who matter most - advise on how to interact with them, and explain why you don’t want to engage with other groups.

You may be the one who has to pressure a CEO who doesn’t feel they’ve done anything wrong to make an apology. Perhaps even step down.

As a trusted advisor, your focus isn’t on producing a press release, a holding statement, or talking points for an interview. Your role is to produce high-quality decisions that will directly affect the organization’s future. Moreover, your own reputation - and your future - are also at stake here. If you give lousy advice, you won’t maintain your trusted status for very long.

Unfortunately, although there are some common characteristics, all strategic challenges are unique: I can’t give you a blanket list of solutions to cover them all.?

However, what I can do is share some techniques that I've found to be incredibly helpful to frame your decision-making and improve the overall quality of your decisions. You can use these tools and techniques to enhance your decision-making and improve the quality of your advice, both in your day-to-day work and in crisis situations.

Before we jump in, it’s important to remember that strategic decision-making requires several other key attributes. The ability to ask good questions, to have the right mindset, and to quickly establish a good understanding of the situation are all required to be a strategic thinker. Make sure you take the time to develop these foundational skills to best support your decision-making.?

You Need the Mental Time and Space

The first, and most crucial, element of good decision-making is similar to one of the principles for strategic thinking: you have to make the time and space for it. Trying to rush a strategic decision without understanding the situation, recognizing the problem, and identifying the critical factors won’t result in a good decision. As with all strategic thinking, trying to make strategic decisions when you’re tired, hungry, or distracted erodes the quality of your process.

So the first thing you need to do is clear your mental space so that you and the other decision-makers can focus and think strategically.

Strategic Doesn’t Have to Mean Complicated

Another important, often-overlooked fact is that strategic problems don’t always require complicated solutions: arriving at a strategic decision often means taking a straightforward, simple path.?

For example, a simple - but highly effective - step in a crisis is to have the CEO apologize. Simply saying, “We're sorry. We made a mistake. We’re going to fix it, and we need to be better,” generates a great deal of goodwill. However, this seemingly obvious, but very effective, solution can be overlooked or shot down when the decision-making process becomes overly complicated. If your team spends too long asking questions like:

• “What about the litigation threats?”
• “What about the CEO’s ego?”
• “What is that going to do to our employees’ morale?”?
• “What's that going to do to the product launch that we have planned for next month?"?

...they could deter the CEO from apologizing, and you’ll end up trying something less effective.

Don’t fall into the trap of believing that simple solutions aren’t effective or strategic. One of my favorite definitions of stupidity is “stupidity is overlooking, because of its simplicity, the most obvious and basic option.”

Pattern Recognition

The third technique when honing your decision-making skills is to develop good pattern recognition, but this is much less straightforward than it sounds. Your pattern-recognition skills will grow over time, as you accumulate your own experiences and understanding of what others have faced. By the time you are a senior communicator and are knocking on the door of becoming a strategic advisor, you will have a whole library of patterns to consult. This recognition skill will help you match a situation to a pattern you’ve seen previously and allow you to ‘look around the corner’ to get a sense of what’s to come.

For example, if you’ve seen the pattern ‘circle, triangle, square’ repeated many times, you can be pretty sure that when you see a circle followed by a triangle that a square will come next.?

This is a huge advantage in situations where time and information are scarce and, despite our desire for more time to plan, we are expected to make big decisions quickly.

If you’ve read ‘Thinking, Fast and Slow’ by Daniel Kahneman, you’ll recognize this pattern recognition as a form of System 1 thinking that takes place “automatically and quickly, with little or no effort and no sense of voluntary control.” (Thinking, Fast and Slow, Kahneman, p. 20-21.)?

However, there are some very significant caveats to note concerning patterns and models.

Models Aren’t Perfect

The first issue concerns the quality of the pattern or model. Models are always flawed, but they improve with increased data and more limited application. A model that predicts weather patterns will be more effective if it is based on many years of data and is limited to a small geographic area. Conversely, trying to predict the weather for the entire United States with a month’s worth of data from Wisconsin won’t be very useful.

Similarly, looking at the pattern ‘circle, triangle, square’ a couple of times might be all that’s needed to identify the pattern. But what if it’s just part of something more complicated??

If the actual pattern is ‘circle, triangle, square, circle, triangle, square, circle, triangle, diamond,’ then predicting ‘square’ after ‘circle, triangle’ will be wrong a third of the time.?

An extended period of observation would have helped you see the whole pattern so you need to ensure that you base your patterns on as much information as possible. That won’t eliminate all errors, and you might still find discrepancies, but the quality will increase as the number of observations grows.?

Another potential flaw with patterns is that they aren’t universal. A pattern you’ve identified in a series of events in the United States won’t necessarily apply in France.

Finally, keep in mind the saying ‘the map is not the terrain’ meaning that the model or pattern you are using is a facsimile or representation of the situation, not the situation itself. You still need to look outside to see what’s going on in order to fully appreciate the situation.

However, patterns are powerful tools and will form a major part of your toolkit as a strategic advisor and thinker. Just keep these limitations in mind and dedicate time to studying events you’ve been a part of and reading about the experiences of others to build your pattern library.

Thought Models

There are many tools and models we can rely on to help us with our decision-making, but here are a few I’ve found handy, particularly when time is tight.

The first is a form of question-inversion, in which you flip the question upside-down. This means that instead of asking ‘How can we get out of this situation?,’ you'd ask, ‘How did we end up in this situation?’

That’s a very basic example, but you get the idea: Flip the question around, and look at the problem from a different perspective to see what solutions emerge.

Another tool I love are matrices. These are quick and simple to put together, but give you a robust framework to guide your thinking.

The following are some matrices and frameworks I’ve used often.

Consequence vs. Reversibility

This matrix allows you to map potential courses of action according to consequence while also comparing those that can be reversed -?which lowers the decision-making pressure - versus those that can’t be undone.?

For example, firing the CFO can’t be undone, so that’s a high-consequence, irreversible decision that needs some long, hard deliberation, the involvement of senior leadership, and board input. However, deciding to initiate legal procedures against another party is consequential but easily reversible.

Likelihood vs. impact

This is a very basic risk matrix that allows you to prioritize risks based on 1) the likelihood of the event occurring and 2) the impact it might have. This allows you to rank risks by severity but also lets you spot any low-likelihood / high-consequence risks.?

The SPE Risk Framework

I also like our simple SPE framework to help determine the type of risk or event you’re dealing with.

Being able to differentiate among the different types of risk and understanding their origins gives you an immediate head start in your planning. Using SPE, you can quickly categorize the source of risk, which helps determine your initial strategy.?For example, a preventable risk would typically require contrition, apology, and efforts to make amends. In contrast, a sector-wide external risk would be something you weather out with the rest of the industry. Obviously, many other, smaller decisions go into planning your response, but SPE sets you on the right track quickly.

Decision-Making Challenges

I don’t want to pretend that simply having a strategic mindset and utilizing a few matrices will ensure that you can always come up with great ideas. Unfortunately, many things can influence your decision-making and get in the way. I won't try to cover them all here, but I do want to highlight a few.

Biases

The word bias is often used to mean hostility toward a particular group, but when it comes to our thinking, we have all kinds of biases that are hardwired into our brains. Some of these go back to prehistoric times - such as most people’s fear of snakes - but we also accumulate our own biases as we grow up, resulting in a set of preferences and dislikes that affects our thinking. The problem is that most of our biases are unconscious and affect our decision-making without us even knowing it. Using models, frameworks, and tools like matrices can help remove subjectivity from your decisions. But you should also challenge yourself, and ask whether your decisions are the result of data and robust patterns, or if something else (a bias) has influenced your decision.

‘If all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail’?

This essentially means you’re a one-trick-pony and have only one model, tool, or approach to any problem. The difficulty is that sometimes, you might encounter a lot of ‘nails’ along the way. So your strategy (get the hammer!) might be quite successful for a long time, making you think that you’ve found the perfect solution to every problem. Even if your hammer only worked once, hindsight bias will make you want to use that approach again, though it might not fit the current situation at all. The simple way to avoid this problem is to start by asking the central question - ‘What is the actual problem we are trying to solve?’ - and then select the appropriate tool from a well-stocked toolkit for that task.

Navel-gazing

As communicators, our key differentiator in a team is our knowledge of what’s going on outside. Unlike the other elements of an organization, which are typically inward-focused, our job is to look outside. Unfortunately, there can be a tendency to spend too long looking inward in a crisis which results in a ‘the map is not the terrain’ issue I mentioned above. Just remember to look outside and to bring those perspectives into your decision-making.

Groupthink

Finally, beware of groupthink: a phenomenon in which a desire for agreement and a tendency to skew to extremes leads groups to make decisions based on consensus rather than facts. The Challenger O-rings and the subprime mortgage collapse of 2008 are both examples in which the data was available to decision-makers, but a reluctance to defy the group led to catastrophe.

As I said, there are many things that can get in your way and interfere with your decision-making and these are just a few. However, keeping these in mind, and using the tools outlined above will help you make facts-based, objective decisions in a timely manner.

Conclusion

As trusted advisors of any kind - and particularly as strategic communicators - our value is based on the quality of the advice we provide and the decisions we make. The future direction of an organization is shaped by what we say: our advice can determine whether a company recovers from a crisis or goes into a death spiral. Our value is based upon the quality of our advice and the soundness of our decisions.

We need to spend time ensuring that we have the mindset, models, and frameworks required to make these high-consequence decisions. We need a library of patterns; simple, practical models; and the right mindset, along with a great set of questions and highly developed EQ.?

These attributes don’t appear overnight, and this is an area of lifelong learning: we can’t just go through 20 years of crises and show up in year 21 with the same model that worked last decade and hope we’re good to go.

Instead, we need to take the time to study, practice, and strengthen this vital muscle so that when things are at their most dire, we can provide the guidance, counsel, and wisdom the organization needs to solve its most complex challenges.