What we learned:
Question the assumptions behind your routines
The assumption behind my routines is that they are necessary, effective, and efficient to help all of us manage our time and meet our goals. It is important to question these assumptions periodically to ensure that they still make sense, as circumstances and needs can change over time. This assumption works in the same way as in a company. We always should question the assumptions behind the company’s routines and try figuring out how we’d operate if they didn’t hold.
Invest in building expertise.
New heuristics and improvisations may appear spontaneous, but they work best when they rest on a foundation of knowledge and training. This kind of situation happens with some frequency in almost all professions, an example is a surgery where the doctor is forced to perform an urgent intervention due to the patient’s unexpected reaction.
Identify your priorities.
If a crisis unfolds, red lights and alarms go off everywhere, and managerial attention becomes very scarce. In such situations, leaders need to focus on the metrics central to moving the organization through the turmoil. By doing so, they can help everyone tackle the most pressing problems and concentrate on the activities that are essential to avoiding a collapse; everything else will simply have to wait.
Learn to give up control.
In a crisis, solutions are not obvious and seldom come from a top-down approach. All organizational brains are needed to solve problems on the spot. If those brains don’t feel empowered to act immediately, a problem can quickly get worse. This goes beyond the traditional advice about empowerment, which says that people should be given limited freedom to make decisions in their area. Organizations that survive dangerous times have developed the ability to swiftly delegate authority and decision-making to people with expertise on the front lines. Here’s the beauty of analyzing your routines and practicing new ways to solve problems in anticipation of a crisis: Your organization will become more adept at heuristics and improvisation, which will make it more resilient and resourceful—and better able to cope when uncertainty does reach alarming levels.
Practice doing more with less.
We can’t think of any actual crisis that didn’t involve resource scarcity of some kind. The Everest climb certainly did. So, it makes sense to get used to working lean.
Managers can challenge a unit by asking it to achieve an ambitious goal with significantly fewer resources than normal, for example. Or a team can brainstorm about how it would respond if a key resource suddenly became scarce.
Analyze which tools you use to get different chunks of work done.
The point isn’t to do fine-grained process mapping—it’s to think at a high level about how you handle work. Such an analysis isn’t necessarily straightforward, though, because most work gets broken down into parts that may call for different tools. If you do A/B testing on new product features, for example, you almost certainly have a rigorous organizational routine in place—whereas decisions about what to test may be more open-ended and improvisational. Do your best to build a picture of which approaches are used where, and whether your organization favors a particular one. Then think about whether it’s the best choice for most of those tasks. You’ll manage a crisis better if you’ve analyzed