There Is No Such Thing As a Crisis
You've heard this before: "We have a real crisis situation on our hands here!"
...Your last option for funding your venture just fell through and you're out of cash next Friday.
...The entire system crashed and the most recent data backup is from last month.
...Your two key employees just emailed you to say that they quit to join your biggest competitor.
Are any of these a legitimate business crisis for a growing company?
I would argue that you should calmly say "nope". Saying "yes" to the idea of a crisis is giving yourself permission to be reactive and slip into non-action or victimhood. That will never help solve the situation.
If you have time to label something a crisis, you're actually just experiencing a sub-optimal situation.
We think we're dealing with a crisis because our body is telling us in no uncertain terms, "WHOA, THIS IS A CRISIS!!" What's that feel like? We're stunned and on the ropes. Increased heart rate and blood pressure. A sense of tightness in the chest. Heavy legs. Dizziness. Dry mouth. You might feel like you want to run and hide under a rock. You might start screaming at your colleagues. You might fall into resignation and do nothing like a lamb at slaughter.
When we experience crisis triggers, we're not in a position to think or act our way through a business situation and that makes us even more anxious. Even though that anxiety-ridden bodily reaction won't help us, it happens anyway. We're dealing with a physiological reaction to "bad" information that has come into our body. The information is not what we want to have happening to us. We show ourselves a very quick movie of a high-res doomsday scenario resulting from this bad information and it is so utterly convincing to our body that it goes into an evolutionarily adaptive response that unfortunately has no place in the conceptually abstracted world of 21st century business.
In other words, our bodies think they're about to fall off a cliff and our minds are worried about insufficient future cash flows. Something has to get re-aligned here.
The metaphor of telling oneself or somebody else to "control your emotions" does not work. Emotions are, by definition, beyond rational control. Don't fight what we're feeling, but instead give it a larger frame of reference so that our emotions themselves ease up and expand back to normalcy. Imagine a pinball machine with the ball bouncing around violently. That's our emotional state when in a perceived crisis. Now imagine the playing field of the pinball machine being 10x bigger with the little metal ball itself staying the same size... What would that look like? A heck of a lot more space between bumpers means a lot less banging around, less kinetics. That's the kind of space we need to create for our emotions to run their natural course and return to normal.
To achieve this goal, there is a conversational exchange that two or more team members can have when the inevitable "we have a crisis" situation shows up in your company (and they always will)... It only requires one person to be the Calm One to however many Freaked Ones there happen to be with bulging veins and dry mouths.
Calm One: "Okay. This sounds serious. Question for you, do we have time to react to what is happening around us on this?"
Freaked One: ".... Yes."
Calm One: "Okay, then lets remember that we are not in a crisis, we are merely in a situation. Do we have time right now to formulate a series of actions?"
Freaked One: "Yes, I suppose so."
Calm One: "Okay, so we have room to work on this calmly. Cool. So, can you take a guess at how many decision cycles we can go through before we run out of time?" (Force a guess on the Freaked. It doesn't matter.)
Freaked One: "I have no idea... I'm guessing maybe 7 potential things we can do, maybe 8 if we have til Friday."
Me: "So, we have plenty of time to use our minds to think logically through this situation and come to 7 iterations of decisions. Okay. Sounds like we are in a time-sensitive situation but we can execute into this. Is that right?"
This sort of exchange helps quickly reframe that we are, in fact, not helpless and faced without options. It creates an expanse of available working space with which to solve business problems. Such a situation might be time-challenged, but it is not a crisis. Crisis is not a useful term. We almost always have actions available to us, and more than we initially think.
Whenever your team comes in with an emotionally charged reaction to a "crisis", help them shift back into execution mode NOT by smothering out the emotional state or denying it, but simply by changing the assumptions of the current situation. Expand their perspective to include the more than ample time to engage actions that can lead to a solution.
