Crisis and Being Defensive
Two Thursdays ago, Miami Dolphins quarterback Tua Tagovailoa suffered a massive concussion during a prime time game. The images of him lying rigid on the field led to a conversation about how effective the National Football League is in keeping players safe.
What was interesting to see in the aftermath was the defensive posture that almost everyone took.
The independent doctor who examined Tua after a suspected concussion in the previous game was fired for being standoffish when questioned about his examination.
The team doctors’ main line was that they had examined Tua for concussion symptoms every day between the Sunday game and the Thursday game.
The Dolphins head coach, Michael McDaniel, went with an “other people made the decisions” approach in his post-game press conference. He said, “What goes into every one of those decisions, that it starts with your medical staff but then there’s independent specialists that look into it, too. There’s an entire protocol and then you’re talking to the player as well. There’s probably five or six different layers of a process and decision-making like you do with all players.”
What was striking to me is that no one said something like, “Obviously, this shows we have an opportunity to improve. We’re going to make sure Tua is healthy, and at the same time, we’re going to look at what happened to see how we can decrease the chances of this happening again.”
(Viper’s quote from the original Top Gun comes to mind here: “A good pilot is compelled to evaluate what's happened, so he can apply what he's learned.”)
The distinction between the defensive responses after Tua’s injury and an opportunity response occurred to me because, before the game on Thursday, I read the book The Prepared Leader. In the book, Erika James, the dean of Wharton School of Business, and Lynn Perry Wooten, the president of Simmons College, share their research into effective crisis response.
They write that when we experience crises as threats, “we hunker down and turn our focus inward. [...] We tend to hide or to conceal and protect our vulnerabilities.” Hence, the defensive responses from those involved in the Tua concussion situation.
James and Perry Wooten contrast that to taking an opportunity approach. When we do that, they write, “We tend to base our decision-making more on the external environment and less on our internal feelings of threat or exposure. In business terms, opportunities invite us to move outside our comfort zones, explore new possibilities, disrupt things, and develop new markets. [...] Faced with an opportunity, you are more inclined to prioritize gain over loss and achievement over failure.”
In their model, a prepared leader is good at doing both, and knows when to shift from defense to offense.
The other big takeaway from The Prepared Leader is the reminder that life is just a series of crises. They write: “Crises are not one-off events. They happen time and time again. Just as one crisis starts to resolve, another is already taking shape.”
For me, the primary implication is that we should be organized to respond to crises at all times.
For example, effective crisis response requires an agile team that can bring the best information from across the organization together, and then make decisions quickly under uncertainty. The challenge is that if a team does not build these muscles during “normal” times, they won’t have them available in the crisis.
James and Perry Wooten’s advice for leaders in a crisis: “Be agile, transparent, and ready to delegate. Minimize all red tape and bureaucracy, and remain as open and accessible to your team as possible. Be ready to share bad as well as good news so as not to minimize real threats or risks, and encourage your people to share feelings of anxiety or stress. Know, too, when to step away and let others take the lead.”
But if crises are perpetual, then that’s how we should lead in every moment. James and Perry Wooten suggest that leaders ponder these three questions:
Does your organization respond deftly to change, or do hierarchy and processes create bottlenecks?
Do your teams currently have the autonomy to make critical decisions?
What practices and procedures can you put in place now that might drive greater autonomy and agility?
Moreover, because crises happen perpetually, there’s probably never going to be a time in the future when our jobs are easier, less stressful, or less demanding.
Recently, a client told me that she’d worked most of the last weekend to meet a safety review deadline for an important new product her company is creating, Our conversation—with the details obscured—sounded like this:
Client: My workload should be easier once we launch the product.
Me: When will that happen?
Client: Next fall.
Me: So for the whole next year, you’ll have these big sprints of work?
Client: Yes, but it should be fine after that.
Me:Correct me if I’m wrong, but don’t you have hundreds of people in the company working every day on new ideas that will also need your team to do safety reviews?
Once she reflected on that dynamic, it was much more obvious why she needed to treat the “we need to work all weekend” moments as part of the work—not an exception from the norm.
The implication is that we should always plan for slack in our personal systems so that we have time and energy for the expected pushes.
For example, when I walk past a firehouse and see the firefighters lounging outside, I think, “That’s great.” That means they’re ready to handle an emergency.
But if I saw them frantically managing an avalanche of projects and tasks, or tending to calls that are clearly not emergencies for firefighters (e.g., situations where a social worker or health aide might be the better responder), then I worry. Being too busy means they might not be ready to respond when the actual emergencies arise.
Effectively responding to emergencies requires lounging around a bit. It’s not an indulgence—it’s preparedness.
Leadership Wisdom
“And when you are dealing with the uncertain or unprecedented, you also need to be able to improvise. You need to be able to react inventively, creatively, and effectively- in sync and in tune with your changing context. You need to be able to do so deftly and without fear. Because fear of the unknown, of failure can leave you out of time when things are moving faster than you'd like. Perhaps it's helpful to remember that in jazz, a single note is neither intrinsically right nor wrong. It's the note that comes after it that will determine how coherent the whole piece is. As Miles Davis famously put it: ‘There are no wrong notes in jazz, just notes in wrong places.’”
— Erika James and Lynn Perry Wooten in The Prepared Leader