j e s r u s h . c o m

Crisis management is one of the most undervalued management skills: It’s rarely taught in business school and no one cares until things hit the fan. But when they do, a steady hand at the helm can guide a team through the stormiest of waters. The most important thing is to be systematic and to keep making decisions. I wanted to step through the anatomy of a recent crisis and explain what I did and why it worked.

The crisis: This particular crisis began on a quiet weekday when a customer sent us an email out of the blue stating that our system — which was installed at their site — was hogging all their network bandwidth and freezing their computers. Apparently, it was so bad that their employees could barely work. And the problem coincided with use of our system earlier in the day.

Yikes!!!

Step 1: Re-prioritize and compartmentalize.

A potential crisis must be bushwhacked with great force. If you hit it hard enough and fast enough, you can sometimes avert the crisis altogether, or at least minimize its impact. I pretty much dropped everything I was doing to focus entirely on this issue.

Meanwhile, I did everything possible to compartmentalize the issue and maintain the impression of normalcy with the customer. Crises have a tendency to take on a life of their own (if you let them) and it’s important to carry on as if everything is under control. After acknowledging the email with a quick phone call to the sender, I made a point of speaking with other people at the customer’s office about unrelated issues. They didn’t mention anything about the network and nor did I.

Step 2: Plan for Sea Animals

When someone accuses you or your team or your products of causing a problem, it’s only natural to react skeptically. Your people are good and your widgets work just fine–thank you very much.

A good manager has to fight that urge. It’s possible the whole thing could be a misunderstanding, but it’s equally possible the crisis could be real. Real crises often turn out to be bigger than their initial boundaries. They’re like those foam capsules you drop in a sink full of water, they turn into two foot alligators.

With that in mind, I assumed the worst. Maybe our system was somehow causing total work stoppage. Maybe it was interrupting crucial business process. Perhaps it had been affecting their network even before today. Could the system have been compromised? It might get even worse. By thinking through these possibilities, you help ensure that the scope of your response is sufficiently wide. And mentally, you ensure that you’re not going to be caught off guard by unexpected bad news.

Step 3: “Trust, but verify.”

In the famous words of President Reagan, it’s time to figure out whether this crisis has any teeth. Using your enlarged scope from step 2, you do some fact-finding and gather hard data. A good starting point is simply the five W’s (who, what, where, when, and why).

In this case, we delved into the system logs in question, looking for activity indicators. Of course we also looked at past days, kicked off virus scans, and asked for more details from the customer contact.

Step 4: Report

If the crisis looks legit, the next step is to immediately notify your boss. You don’t want to shirk from delivering bad news. Better now than later. I walked over to my bosses office with a fistful of data showing that our system had definitely been active around the same time that the customer experienced issues. I also notified the project manager currently using the system as well as the salesperson who sold it to the customer to begin with.

Step 5: Imagine it’s High School

Although you’re trying to maintain the appearance of normalcy, you have to plan for the possibility that in short order — everyone will know: Everyone at your customer, all of your employees, maybe even your competitors, or (gulp) the press.

If/when they do, you need to have something prepared to tell them that will maintain control and nip the rumors. I worked up a short memo laying out the facts and explaining that no link had been proven between our systems and their network problems — yet. Sure enough within a half hour, another manager was asking for information about the situation. Click! Memo sent.

Step 6: Build a Project Plan/Team

The simplest way to tackle a multi-headed dragon is to break it down into small, concrete tasks and assign them to specific people. Usually a gantt chart with tasks/due dates and a RACI chart outlining roles & responsibilities is sufficient.

I doled out a couple of tasks to the PM with a next day deadline, and outlined the steps which we would be taking to further investigate the issue.

To make a long sleeve short, over the next week we ultimately discovered two things:

1) Their network slowness did not perfectly correspond to use of our system. Meaning, they had *other* unrelated issues contributing to the slowness.

2) They had changed their network architecture, reducing throughput in the process. This was news to us and information which would’ve been useful yesterday.

So in the end, it turned out that our system was behaving normally and was fully exonerated. It was doing the same things it had always done, but the environment it operated in had changed (for the worse). After explaining this to them via a teleconference, we dialed back our system activity until they could get their network\throughput issues worked out. We followed up with a written explanation reiterating the same things said on the phone. Fortunately, they understood.

Step 7: No Pain — No Gain.

Lastly, you want to use the momentum from the crisis to change the processes (or even people) so that it never happens again. Be a change agent.

In this case, the crisis had more bark than bite since it really wasn’t our fault. But nonetheless we still used the energy to improve our system testing/planning process, so that we would be more likely to detect an environment change at the customer before things go south.

Wrapping Up

This particular crisis turned out well and they don’t always go so smoothly. The steps above sound incredibly simple in retrospect, but it’s amazing to me how few people actually follow them. Ultimately a crisis should only make you and your organization stronger, but things can and will spiral out of control if you’re not careful.

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