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Crisis Management
A 2-&-1/2-Day
Management Seminar
What do typical organizational
crises look like?
There's a rumor circulating about your agency
or your team. It's a rumor about an extremely serious issue. You feel
that ignoring it will cause problems, . . . but so will addressing it!
. . . You get totally contradictory advice from your experts and advisors!
You don't have the information -- and for a long time won't have the
information -- you either need to confirm or deny the rumor . . . You
need a compass, a North Star, a strategy . . .
Crisis Management Strategies
are to Management . . .
. . . what Flight
Emergency Procedures are to Aviation.
Pilots who aspire to be
the very best -- both civilian and military -- aspire to being able
to concentrate on controlling the aircraft even when everything is
going wrong, . . . even in the midst of a crisis. They aspire
to a level of flying skills that result in an almost super-human level-headedness
exemplified by the likes of Chuck Yeager. The best of professional pilots
continuously hone their skills to an ever-increasing level of professionalism
that allows for clear, cool thinking precisely when it is needed the
most; when everything's going very wrong, . . . That's when the rest
of us more ordinary human beings get rattled, lose our cool, forget
our training, and can't think straight . . . After all, it's perfectly
normal to get scared and confused by the impossibility of an unraveling
situation, to have one's thinking clouded by emotions or frustration,
anger, fear, terror, . . . That's why skilled pilots constantly study,
train, and practice emergency procedures: engine failures, fires,
control malfunctions, explosions, etc . . . When the airliner on which
you are flying develops a serious mid-air emergency, you hope that the
pilots up in the cockpit aren't just ordinary humans; you hope they're
not only good pilots... but very good pilots!...
You hope that they have "the right stuff".
Although managers are faced
with having to handle crises far more often than
pilots are, we almost never train them in how to manage crises!
. . . Think about it! . . . Providing leadership to your organization
in a crisis, . . . is no different than keeping control of that DC-10
even though the pilots just lost the hydraulic pressure without which
they cannot operate the critical flight-control surfaces . . . If you
aspire to be an excellent manager -- one who will perform well, even
brilliantly, under the pressure and chaos of a crisis -- you would
do well to do what pilots who aspire to having "the right stuff" do:
allow yourself to benefit from the kind of training they benefit from
throughout their careers: . . . Crisis-Management training! Give
yourself that chance!
Some obvious differences
between the professionalism of pilots and managers:
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Pilots -- at least
the best pilots -- train all their lives in how to handle emergencies:
fires, engine flame-outs, wing-icing, control-system failures, instrument
malfunctions, hijackings, etc., etc . . . They subject themselves
to simulated emergencies that are so extreme and far-out that it would
be way too dangerous to practice those crisis situations in an airplane.
They, therefore, do it in computer-driven aircraft simulators, called
Link-Trainers. In these Link-Trainers pilots are subjected to simulated
fires, engine flame-outs, control-system failures, etc. They are so
realistic, it's spooky! And, they keep putting themselves through
these meat-grinder emergency-simulations not just during their initial
pilot-training, but throughout their careers! It's this
kind of career-long willingness to study, train, and practice
emergencies that -- actually -- most of them never experience in real
life, that makes so many of our professional pilots not only good
. . . but phenomenally good.
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Mangers, on the whole,
don't do anything like this! . . . Even though
they experience crises in their jobs far more often than pilots do,
. . . and even though these management crises are every bit as difficult
and challenging to handle well as flight emergencies are.
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Not surprisingly, a
disturbingly high percentage of crisis management case-studies turn
into "Basket-Case" case-studies . . . where poor judgment leads
to management's equivalents of airplane crashes: devastated organizations,
ruined careers, demoralized teams, utterly failed missions, . . .
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The idea of Link-Trainers
for honing the skills of pilots is a brilliant idea. It has developed a corps of outstanding pilots. It has elevated the level
of professionalism of pilots to a level that simply could not be achieved
otherwise. And most of all, it has saved many lives.
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It's an idea that
deserves to be copied for the training of managers! In fact, it's
downright stupid not to do so. Link-Trainers for pilots are machines
that are expensive to build and operate. Link-Trainer equivalents
for managers are easier to create and cheaper to operate.
Our Crisis Management
seminar is a Link-Trainer for managers who aspire to be the best they
can be . . .
For managers who want
to be valuable leaders, especially when things
get crazy . . . This seminar is not about basic management. We assume
you master that. It's about getting yourself so centered on your mission
that -- should you, someday, find yourself thrust into a managing a crisis
-- you'll become a case-study in "Leadership and Vision in the Midst
of a Crisis" . . . and not another Basket-Case case-study of
"Leadership-Failure Under Pressure". Just because you're a manager and
not a test-pilot doesn't mean you can't develop "the right stuff" and
be the organizational leadership equivalent of a Chuck Yeager.
 The Crisis-Management Course . . .
at this time . . . is offered only on an In-House basis. . .
 For
information on scheduling In-House Crisis Management
courses
 Register For a Course
 Fee Schedule
 For more information
on IPMP and our (Hans and Annemarie Bleiker's ) overall approach to becoming
effective public officials, visit our Citizen Participation Handbook page.
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IPMP