Crisis = Danger + Opportunity

There are a lot of great examples, anecdotes, quotes, and adages we used every day to educate or make a point when we are consulting or teaching teams about business in general or  continuous improvement specifically.  Some of our favorites include:

• If you only have a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.  ~  variations of this quote are attributed to Abraham Maslow, Mark Twain, and others.
• If you need a new machine and don't buy it, you end up paying for it anyway and not having it. ~ Henry Ford
• If there is no leadership from the top, stop promoting TQC. ~ Kaoru Ishikawa
• Knowing never equals doing.  ~ Mariah Smith
• It is always good to have at least one person on the team that knows what the heck they are doing. ~ Walt Disney

At the June 3, 2014, we attended The Axelson Center of North Park University's 15th Annual Symposium for Nonprofit Professionals and Volunteers.  John Plunket, Plan B Synergy,  showed the Chinese characters for 'crisis.'  The two characters that make up this word, crisis, are:  Danger and Opportunity.  John related that he has a rubber stamp of the Chinese characters with the two English words on his desk.  Very cool.  We immediately adding this to our quiver of examples, anecdotes, quotes, and adages.

In a crisis, the focus, first and foremost is to mitigate the danger.  The focus is on staving off disaster, stopping the bleeding, or whatever metaphor and effort is necessary survive as intact as possible.  It is advisable to have Contigency Plan where they are appropriate and feasible (please look at our blog on Contingency Plans).  More often than not, when a crisis is looming or hits, management teams scramble to organize, mobilize, and fight to beat the crisis.  Some organizations 

We certainly believe that first and foremost the 'danger' part of the crisis must dealt with as quickly and effectively as possible.  But as we advocate the Total Quality approach to management, we also believe every crisis is also an opportunity.  Every crisis is an opportunity for organizational learning and continuous improvement.

Our belief is that every organization needs to incorporate After Action Reviews (AAR).  An AAR is a formal de-brief process developed by the US Army to ensure learnings, best practices, preventative measures, and more were discussed and incorporated into policies, procedures, operations, and doctrine (i.e. business processes) moving forward.  Per the US Army, an AAR is defined:

An AAR is a professional discussion of an event, focused on performance standards, that enables soldiers to discover for themselves What happened, Why it happened and How to sustain strengths and improve on weaknesses.

It is a tool leaders and units can use to get maximum benefit from every mission or task.

We agree that the AAR is a tool leaders and teams can use to realize that maximimum opportunity from any crisis.

There are countless documents available online.  One that we like is the USAID After-Action Review:  Technical Guidance.  The USAID process and terminology is more suitable to business processes than the US Army's version.