What do you do when a crisis breaks or is about to break – at least from your perspective? Go into panic mode? Many people do head, sometimes prematurely, into panic when they think a crisis is imminent. Panic rarely provides answers though, at best panic gives you a momentary band aid, but only for your own emotions. Do you handle all crisis situations in the same way?
Your crisis MO is important because it’s the way you resolve crises that helps give you understanding. Do you begin to take action to counteract the impending crisis before it happens? Or, do you wait till it actually is a crisis and then scramble? Or maybe you are an options/alternative planner an ‘if-then’ scenario approach? I would suggest that this is the best strategy to crisis resolution. This is a monitoring approach to what is happening in order to make quick and decisive changes when needed. Simply, it’s part of the overall plan.
Not all impending, apparent crisis explode into a full blown disaster. Sometimes all you need do is to tweak what is happening, but sometimes it’s far more serious and you’ll need to ‘cut your losses’. However, it is your ‘situation assessment’ behavior that is most important. Before you throw in the towel or tweak, you need to look at your beginning, your objectives, your methodology, your goal and where you are on the continuum to the goal. All these analyses will lead you in what you need to do, when, and how. Granted, in some cases the analysis has to be very fast but it should never be abandoned because of time. The point here is – did you place monitoring/check points along the path?
Crises do not necessarily need to be reacted to by panic behavior. But if this is your initial reaction then… get the emotion out and then determine what you should do. A crisis may become a way to ‘think outside the box’, to come to a new and exciting way to goal accomplishment. It also may close the door, at least at this point, to your goal which now opens up your ‘schedule’ for a different goal.
