This week brought forth a popular yet less revered subject to the limelight. Disaster management or crisis management is one of the things that most leaders know that they ought to have drills on, but is seldom taken with the seriousness it deserves. I find this to be true, whether in small, medium or large organizations. In the software world, disasters have led to multi-national companies being dragged to endless court battles, often loosing their reputation and invites competition to hawk-eyed competitors. This is not only true for blue-chip companies, but also for small start-ups that often ignore the need to be reflective and adaptive. Take the case of Barrings Bank, London, which faced one of the greatest banking disasters, when one of their employees brought it to it’s knees. Nick Leeson, a rookie who quickly escalated the career ladder in the banking sector, transacted on the Singapore International Monetary Exchange (SIME) for close to a year, unnoticed. While it may be termed as a poor oversight on the business operations of the bank, it also leads to different thinking on how many disasters can be avoided, if the leadership is proactive and there is a clear definition of responsibilities.
Back to what happened this week, our IT team lost the storage server that controls the VM’s, the domain controller, and a host of other critical servers. Initially, it was underestimated to be a minor problem that could, as usual, be resolved by restarting the storage or some other server in the server room and bingo!!! No, it was not the case in this situation. The situation quickly escalated to a series of “Yeah, we are almost back to business…” to “No, this is not true, it is not happening…” to “How come we did not see this…” and in between, there were accusations and counter-accusations. This did not help the situation either, as the environment soon became too toxic, and meanwhile, there were frustrated employees and customers who could not get their concerns addressed. The whole situation was even made worse by the fact that there was no proper communication on the whole situation and no one took charge of the chaos to restore normalcy. After realizing the magnitude of the problem and undergoing through the denial phase, they had at least undergone half a cycle of the Kubler-Róss change management model. Realizing the magnitude of the problem, the next step was to contact a consultancy company to help resolve the problem.
To say the least, it was an uncomfortable situation to be in, and I had my fair share of lessons learned on what “Chaos” can do to an organization. The following three invaluable lessons are things that I walk away with, from this situation.
Communication: It cannot be said in any better way, than simply telling the team to COMMUNICATE. This is both within the team and also outside the team. How are the stakeholders kept informed of the situation? Do we push information out or do we sit pretty and wait for stakeholders to pull the information? In what platform is the information delivered? What content is delivered to stakeholders? How do we manage panic and stress levels amongst our stakeholders? Who is in charge of the communication process? Are we delivering information frequently and in a timely fashion? All these are important factors to consider if we are to ensure that communication is well managed and monitored.
Leadership: In the midst of a disaster, it is at times difficult to remain sensible, making it natural to panic and make blunders. It is even easier to point fingers and imagine that someone else should take a fair share of the blame. Does it solve the problem? Not at all. In fact, it does the opposite. The leadership has to take responsibility and give direction on how to restore normalcy as soon as possible. Engage your team to understand what the problem is before trying to “solve any problem”. Is it Unknown-known, known-known, Known-unknown, or unknown-unknown? What is the relationship between the cause and effect of the problem at hand? Which constraints are involved in the situation at hand? As a leader, are you asking enough questions to keep the team engaged? How are you as a leader helping the team to collaborate and work towards coming out of the chaos?
Problem-Solving: How do you resolve the problem? Is the whole team working jointly on one issue at a time or are there well-defined responsibilities to widen coverage? Are the team members continuously regrouping to compare notes or are they working in silos? What valuable lessons are you learning from each other along the way and how are these leveraged to quickly come out of the woods? How are decisions being made in the midst of the disaster? This is very important as there may be no time to make a proper analysis and evaluate the consequences of the decisions made.
These three lessons are important in the midst of a disaster. But there are even other equally if not more important lessons, which should be covered after the disaster. How does your team handle disasters? As a leader, how do you handle disasters? If you never had a disaster, then it is time to take heed and be proactive, making simulations of how to handle such situations. Kindly share in the comment section, your experience in disaster recovery.
Project Management 