Never waste a good crisis — part 1 — How can we learn from a crisis?
What a crisis teaches us about planning & prioritisation
What can this teach us when thinking about Product development? I will walk through the concepts and takeaways that this live example of COVID-19, which touches every business and every consumer, can teach us.
How can we learn from a crisis?
There are a few ways value can be salvaged from a crisis. Let’s quickly review to set a frame for our exploration.
‘Never waste a good crisis’ is attributed to Winston Churchill around the time of the Yalta conference post WW2* although if he did say it, for which there is much conjecture among etymologists, I am not sure the exact intent of his meaning. I assume it most likely Churchill would have meant using a crisis as a catalyst around which to rally people and agreement. What is interesting to me is why does a crisis make this work and if we know what the conditions are that enable this, can we use this knowledge beyond the context of crisis?
More recently Rahm Emmanuel said something similar: “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that [is] it’s an opportunity to do things that you think you could not before.” This quote on the same adage identifies the power of lateral thinking and taboo-breaking consensus that can be opened up, sometimes unlocking new possibilities as a characteristic of a crisis. This is an interesting ‘super-power’ of doing things during a crisis that often seems to enable achievements that may otherwise seem impossible during normal business operations. So let’s also look at this laterality as another learning opportunity from the COVID crisis.
One other similar but different angle is captured in a variation of this phrase and that is ‘Never waste a good failure’ which in IT is often referenced in the context of Post Incident Reviews, a practice that involves reviewing and agreeing on preventative measures for an incident affecting a service. This variation is often associated with what we can learn from the things that went wrong and what measures we discovered that would help make us resilient to similar failures in the future. This is a backwards-looking approach to learning from a crisis or actions within a crisis.
In this post, I will cover each of these related concepts and see what we can learn from looking at our crisis through the lens of each — namely;
- a crisis can be leveraged by leaders to rally support — let’s explore why that works and whether this knowledge could be applied in the everyday,
- crises may help us challenge assumptions — so why is that and how could that help us,
- failures and how we addressed them can teach us some more evergreen lessons which can be used outside the context of a crisis,
“You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that [is] it’s an opportunity to do things that you think you could not before.” — Rahm Emanuel
*Like most quotes they can generally be traced back significantly earlier than their most famous utterers.
Here is the series of posts where I tackle these questions:
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