"Do not fear mistakes - there are none” Miles Davis
Of late, I’ve been thinking about the fear of getting it wrong, the paralysing fear of making a mistake, and how it limits discovery. So many of the corporate rule books are based on meticulous procedures. Playing it safe is a mantra, and what it leads to is repetition. But this is no way for organizations to discover new insights, to leap beyond the obvious and add excitement and entertainment to what they do or offer. This reminded me of the sage advice from the musician Miles Davis, who said, ‘Do not fear mistakes, there are none.’ This may seem counterintuitive, even reckless, to those who design their professional lives around certainty. But what Davis is urging us to do is to move beyond the fear of failure.
What this means in practical terms is that leaders have to be decisive, especially when a crisis unfolds. They cannot hesitate to act because inaction is what deepens even the most benign of crisis. This takes us back to Davis’ dictum, ‘do not fear mistakes’ Of course those organizations that are crisis ready are the ones that invest long before a crisis arrives in crisis readiness. The internal teams will have put in the preparatory work and what remains are the hard choices. One thing that some organizations fail to do is to appoint a credible, well-trained spokesperson. Such a person can be the difference when handling a highly public crisis, because a spokesperson gives you a face that moves the matter from the impersonal to the personal.
Because so many of the crises that organizations face today play out in public digital platforms, the difference between those who thrive or wilt in the face of a crisis often comes down to who acts quickest and the choices they make. One thing is certain, digital communications moves at lightning speed and organizations no longer have the luxury of the predigital era when communications moved at the speed of the printing press. Once you add the element of an irate customer or stakeholder group with access to social media, the speed of resolution has to be picked up. This is where a trusted, experienced independent advisor comes in. Because it can be very hard for those directly and personally confronted with a crisis to make the best choices. Your advisor should be someone who is a veteran of crisis situations and who helps steer you past your current crisis.
There is no doubt that those companies that are able to effectively manage crises will be those that are able to leverage technology to make better decisions. Tech-driven insights empower companies to act with speed and add to the management toolkit available to decisive leaders.
At 48H we have a deep understanding of the situations that lead to crisis resolution, starting with our proprietary diagnostic tool Vice. We use digital dashboards to provide our clients an understanding of how badly the crisis has impacted them and what they need to do to recover lost ground. We employ insights that we have learned from helping our clients manage a variety of crisis events. But in all the situations that lead to a successful resolution, we always urge our clients to lead, especially in crisis situations.
Not all crises play out in the public domain, nor even on digital platforms. But even those that begin their life in a remote storefront or behind an unconnected desk have a way of landing up on the digital terrain. No matter how a crisis begins or where it begins, it is essential to know that there are benchmark steps that help move from crisis discovered to crisis averted. The most important of these is the speed of response. The longer you take to respond to a crisis, and the longer you take to act to manage it, the worse it is likely to get. It is as if digital platforms were designed to test which organizations are ready for the future and which have been left in the past.