Leaders are facing turbulent times. The degree of turbulence you’re experiencing depends on your business, your industry, and the exact circumstances you face. Are disruptions in your supply chain forcing you to raise prices? Has a major funding source been cut off? Are you suddenly facing unexpected legal woes? Have regulatory changes rendered your business model obsolete? All of these scenarios are very real to many companies and organizations right now.
This article is about leading in turbulent times. It offers a matrix to help you evaluate the position you’re in relative to others. And we provide some tips both on decision making and building the capacity to weather the storm.
Let’s start with a useful comparison. Imagine the pilot of a jetliner facing turbulent weather. The pilot sees a major weather system suddenly appear on the flight path. How does she or he respond?
In any crisis, the first move is always to seek more information. Do we know the size of the system? Do we know anything about its intensity? What are other pilots doing? But you don’t have much time. Your jet is traveling at 500 mph straight into the heart of the storm – and you’re the pilot. Peoples’ lives depend on what you decide.
One option is to hold the course and try to plow through, but at what cost in wear and tear on the crew, the passengers, and yourself? Could you ascend to a different altitude where the air is cleaner? Is that a choice you have? Is the turbulence severe enough that you need to change course? And most radical of all, do you head to an entirely new destination?
These choices can be plotted on a matrix, where one axis is the degree of turbulence, and another is the degree of choice you have.
“Poly-Crisis” Management – the New Normal
In turbulent times, leaders typically have to address multiple issues – big and small – at a single time and make decisions quickly that have significant strategic import. This “poly-crisis” environment is the new normal. By poly-crisis we mean a cluster of unexpected events (organizational, economic, political, technological, environmental) that interact and amplify each other. In a poly-crisis environment, there’s no going back to some earlier, more normal time. We need to build new skills, habits, and responses.
A Tibetan proverb says, “To be uncertain is uncomfortable. To be certain is foolish.” In turbulent times, there is no certainty. A leader looking for 100% certainty will most certainly fall victim to analysis paralysis. But even without 100% certainty, leaders can adapt quickly if they ask good questions: “What can we do to minimize the risks to our organization?” “What can we do that will minimize the stress on our people?” “What are the one or two things we need to do right now?” “What, if anything, prevents us from doing those things?”
In addition to asking good questions, leaders need to build the capacity across the organization to manage in a poly-crisis environment. Let’s start with a model – the RIDE model – that can help build that capacity.
To lead in turbulent times, we teach people to use the R.I.D.E. approach. When applied across the organization, it can vastly improve your capacity to handle multiple crises at once.
1. Recognize
The first step is to train people to be vigilant in looking for and recognizing anomalies. Some examples:
As you train people to improve their levels of situational awareness, remember to train them to avoid the hidden biases that can prevent us from seeing things clearly. For example, our brains are wired to select information that supports our previous beliefs and discount or ignore evidence to the contrary. This can cause us to under-estimate the importance of something new, something unexpected.
2. Inform
When leading in a poly-crisis environment, the quality of information flow is the difference between success and failure. As a leader, ask yourself:
3. Diagnose
When managing multiple crises, you need to ruthlessly decide what matters now. Nothing can be a priority if everything is. Imagine a doctor in the emergency room. They are trained to triage and decide quickly which patients are most urgent to deal with. They distinguish between “must do,” “should do,” and “could do.” Doctors go through years of training to triage decisively.
When diagnosing what’s going on, consider these questions:
You can use the matrix below to guide you, based on the level of importance and urgency you assign to a given event.
Once you’ve done your diagnosis, you need to manage and track the response. Here’s a template (with an example) you can use to manage and track an array of events happening all at once:
| Field: | Description: |
| Incident Title | “Flight data system offline” |
| Impact Summary | “No access for 4 hours; reporting delayed for all crews” |
| Threat Level | Level 1 (see table below) |
| Status | Identified / In Progress / Resolved |
| Level of Control | Can be fixed with current resources / Cannot be fixed with current resources |
| Owner | Tom K. (primary person coordinating) |
| Support | Sylvia N., Kirk J. (secondary helpers) |
| Comms update | Team standup at 4 pm; email to all affected every hour (who gets updated and when) |
| Next update | Today at 4 pm |
| Escalated To | Operations director and technology director |
Quick, upward flows of information to more senior levels are key to the successful management of most crises. With rare exceptions, senior leaders are in the best position to help mobilize additional resources, communicate effectively, and ward off potential damage. To communicate quickly, you need a short-hand way to alert people about the level of risk. Here’s an example based on the military’s Defense Readiness Condition (DEFCON) model.
| Level 1: | Severe, organization-wide impact; immediate response; severe risk (e.g. declared emergency, threats to human life). |
| Level 2: | Major disruption; urgent response, high risk (e.g. major cyberattack; major system failure). |
| Level 3: | Multi-function impact; respond quickly (e.g. moderate system failure). |
| Level 4: | Local impact; respond within business hours (e.g. local system slowdown). |
| Level 5: | Minor issues with no disruption. |
Escalation protocols should be based on the threat level. For example, all Level 1 and Level 2 incidents should escalate to the highest levels of the organization.
Consider these other best practices to build capacity to manage multiple events at once:
Conclusion
Leading and managing in turbulent times requires rethinking everything about how your business operates. The possibility of failure is real. But failure occurs because no one has planned for the unimaginable. No one has planned to weather multiple storms at once. Building the capacity is all about teaching people how to recognize risks and inform one another quickly. At stake is nothing less than the fate of your organization.
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