April 20, 2007

“Crisis is a great editor.” 

Throughout Ned Cooper’s career, he has sat through as many staff meetings, capabilities presentations, executive reviews, and operational updates as anyone I know.  He is a great seat-mate around the conference room table, always able to quickly distill hours of data into succinct and meaningful information.

Ned and I have had more than our fair share of laughs in meetings together.  This occasion, however, was no time for laughter.  Systems were down.  One of our marquee customers was having difficulty transacting business as a result of these outages.  Our company was responsible.  As a result of our performance, contractual service level penalties would soon be invoked at great cost to our bottom line.  Problems needed to be corrected.  Systems needed to be restored.  The clock was ticking.

Everyone within our organization who even knew how to spell our suffering client’s name jammed into a conference room to address the problem.  There were no niceties to begin the meeting.  In an impressive and commanding way, the manager responsible for service delivery and cost performance on this account marched us through time-critical steps to get service restored to acceptable levels.  It was not the meeting that has become all too familiar in today’s conference rooms.  There was an agenda.  One person was clearly in charge.  Only those people who could make meaningful contributions to the solution spoke.  The assignments were given with full responsibility and accountability.  Everyone left the room with clear direction.

With amazing speed, the problems were fixed, root cause analyses were conducted, and corrective action taken to prevent us from ever meeting on that issue again.  In spite of the service interruption, our customer was impressed at the speed of recovery and ultimate process improvement. 

A week or two later, Ned and I were having lunch (he’s also a great lunch-time companion) and I brought up the meeting that helped set things straight.  Ned’s summary of that meeting was classic:  “Crisis is a great editor.”

We should periodically remember the efficiency and effectiveness that crisis brings out in us.  Staff meetings, capabilities presentations, executive reviews, and operational updates could use the editing.