In the recent past, I saw a major crisis and people’s response to it unfold in front of me.
Chennai, a major city in southern India, home to 5 million people (about the population of Atlanta area) received unprecedented heavy rainfall. This resulted in vast parts of the city being flooded, causing tremendous impact on human life and settlement.
While the crisis played out, and the rescue and relief operations kicked into high gear, I was involved in it as a person responsible for several employees based in Chennai. What I observed and experienced was an organized effort and movement that was breathtaking in its simplicity, speed and effectiveness.
Let me describe a small part of it — think of it like a movie in fast-forward.
I saw a few like-minded people, who had a shared objective of actively tracking and rescuing the impacted fellow human beings, coming together on a What’s app group. Once they started sharing information and commenting on the crisis, a shared conviction of purpose is achieved within couple of hours.
Then, one or two individuals take the responsibility for master planning, another two for identifying access to networks and resources, yet another for setting up the operational process. All of this is voluntary driven, by a need to achieve results. While they do this, they all actively add more people to network in the form of multiple What’s app groups. They continue to share information as it flows in several other social networks and media.
Once the master plan is formed, even crudely, the operational planning kicks in with the new found set of resources and networks. Virtual call centers are formed within the space of minutes to track people, technology tools are setup for communication and tracking, external resources for rescue and relief are verified, master data is collated on the cloud to run the core operation.
Mind you, these steps are not happening sequentially but in a state of overlap, correcting and improving each other. So, the bad location data gets sorted out and corrected by the call center folks, a cell phone tower outage problem that hampers the outbound calls is circumvented by the technology resource leveraging other geo-tracking tools, external resources information gets verified by data team through triangulation.
Once the operation kicks in, it gathers momentum. Every result of the operation, good, bad and the ugly are fed directly back the network in real time. People in the network derives energy from the successful results and continues to build the momentum.
Within the space of 2 days, the network builds to hundreds of people working on a specific scope. This distinction is important — this is NOT a Facebook or group who are purely sharing information, these people are operating in concert to a defined goal. Isn’t that magical?
As I reflect on this, it is apparent that management and leadership is irrevocably changing in the times of social. To me, a large crisis such as the Chennai floods and our response to it is a time-lapse version (say, a film that is viewed at 10X speed) of regular life or business where people come together, objectives are set, plans are made, decisions are taken, actions performed, results evaluated, decisions calibrated and so on.
So if management in crisis can operate effectively in a social way, why can we not do it in regular business?
While I absolutely see the need for governance in the context of any enterprise, why do we need levels of hierarchy in management to achieve defined objectives?
If self-forming teams, self-adapting networks and automatic collaboration can work in crisis, why do we require tons of management process to operate in far more benign environment?
