Why waste a perfectly good crisis

Why waste a perfectly good crisis?

We are right now in the middle of possibly the worst humanitarian crisis of our times. Once the lockdown eases, we will have to probably restart a lot of segments of our economy. It is our choice how we want to emerge from this crisis. As a Victim (Loser), as a Learner or as a Creator(Leader).

The easiest of all is to be the victim. It requires no effort. Just do not take any responsibility, blame everything on circumstances and go with the flow. Then you could use these times to learn. Learn about your own strengths, others, new skills or even those topics that you never had time for, but you always wanted to. You may not come out better but at least you may not be worse of. You would have gained competence and probably increase you value in the post COVID world. I am hopeful that many of us are looking to take this path. But do you know that you also have a third option? You can be a creator, a leader. The role of a creator or leader is to lead their organization to performance. The choices made by the leader impacts a lot of people. It is a big responsibility. A leader can leverage a crisis to transform the business and make high performance available to the team.

Read further only if you want to explore this third option.

Adversity or crisis is the necessary condition for the transformation to take place. People who are comfortable and happy with a predictable, stable state are known to resist change. Stability fosters status quo. When I was trained as a Six Sigma Black Belt, I was taught the equation of change. Here D is the dissatisfaction with existing, V is the vision of what is possible, P is the process to get there and R is resistance to change.

All these years, I have successfully used this formula in bringing about transformation. And it always starts with D - Dissatisfaction with the existing. When things are going good, mindset of people can be broadly categorized in 2 groups- Optimistic and Pragmatic.

The optimistic people, are driven by faith and fear. The central philosophy being – “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”. There is a fear of an unknown new state. The fear can be about lack of ability, loss of power or just the amount of effort required. These are the people who keep the engine running. These are also the people who follow the rules and regulations and make sure that the situation is maintained, and it does not worsen. This dedication to the current way of working is the force that contributes to resistance, “R” in our equation. In my experience, it is very hard to reduce resistance. Resistance, as discussed above is not explicit but in the minds of people. People have a variety of agenda, some stated and some hidden. It is important to address these but not at the start of the transformation journey.

A transformation journey invariably starts with the pragmatic. These people usually tend to focus more on what is missing. This is the “D”, the Dissatisfaction component in our equation. I have known organizations that have spent copious amount of money in just communicating a sense of urgency- Why change and why now. Six Sigma even has the term- “A burning platform” to create an urgency to act. Before one can align people to new goal in V- vision of what is possible, it is necessary that people are open to being aligned. A crisis is a perfect opportunity sow the seeds of transformation. At this time, little effort is required to persuade people to understand, that what has worked so far may not work hereafter. A leader would seize this opportunity to build an organization of their dreams.

In the next few articles in this series I will layout how leaders can leverage the current situation to transform their businesses.

In words of Winston Churchill - “Never let a good crisis go to waste”

You can watch the video version of this article by clicking the link

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