My aim in this short post is to give you a very simple principle for how to handle a crisis. Specifically, how to prevent one crisis sparking off several more.
We all will face crisis at some point in our lives. These are not necessarily bad or unexpected things. For the purpose of this I define a crisis as something that will interrupt and derail any and all of the normal rhythms of your life for a short period of time. Let me give you some examples. You will note that some of these will be unexpected surprises and others will be planned and known about.
- You become unwell and cannot function for a short period of time
- A family member becomes unwell and cannot function and you need to devote your time to caring for them and covering their normal responsibilities
- You move home or office
- A national lockdown is imposed and you have days to re-organise to continue operating.
- You have a baby
- A colleague leaves or goes off sick and no replacement is in place
- An error, mistake, breakdown or other situation means a significant amount of work is required quickly in order to correct it.
This has happened to me recently. I have faced a crisis. This has meant that my normal pattern of work has been disrupted. The right thing for me to, has been to direct my focus elsewhere. This is my explanation for why I have not been as consistent in releasing blog posts, podcasts and videos these past few weeks.
So, how do you handle a crisis. Well, in most cases you will need to devote your attention to it fully. This is ok. When we look at the cope system – Collect, Organise, Plan & Execute – the following principles apply.
- Execution is curtailed. In a crisis all your attention is on resolving or managing what is required. Therefore your normal patterns of execution, be that in work or life, will be impacted. This is ok. Responding to the crisis is the important thing. Everything else is less important.
- Planning is irrelevant. Any plans you had will need to be abandoned and/or adapted on the fly to meet the needs of the moment. This is ok. During a crisis, it is expected that we be more reactive than proactive. Though I would caveat this by saying that our overarching intentionality in terms of what is important in life will still act as a rudder guiding us in our handling of the crisis.
- Organising is not a priority. During a crisis, organising your tasks and your notes and your time need not happen beyond what is needed for the crisis at hand.
- Collection is critical to prevent a future crisis developing.
Point 4 there is my advice. Whatever crisis we are facing, we should endeavour to maintain our habit of capturing indiscriminately. Doing will mean that when things ease off we can still run through the other elements of our system with everything captured. If we miss this out, even during a crisis, we run the risk of missing something important that means a fresh crisis develops.
Having a crisis, as defined above, is not a problem. Reeling from one crisis to another, is a big problem. The way to avoid this is simple. Capture Everything, indiscriminately. Even in a crisis.
