3 Tips to Eliminate Management by Crisis
Stephen Covey talks about “urgency addiction”, where we get caught up in the routine of responding to crisis. We don’t want to deal with the cause of the problem, because we are rewarded for the solution.
However, dealing with crisis requires more effort, time and energy, often leading to increased stress and decreased productivity. There are three steps you can take to gain control over crisis situations.
- Ask whether or not a problem is really a crisis or merely someone’s sense of urgency. If it’s not a crisis, stop dealing with it. Put it on a to-do list, with an appropriate priority and come back to it at the right time.
- Plan. Get in the habit of asking, “What could go wrong here?” Take the answers and create contingency plans.
- Buffer your schedule (#3). Don’t fill your calendar so full that you are unable to address a crisis. If something can go wrong, it will. Allow time to put it right.
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Interesting and essential. I spent 28 years as an officer in the Canadian Army and management by crisis was repeated one problem after another. We called it pressing the “panic button”. At the level of the company or the bataillion, management by crisis was repeated each day, wheher an emergency existed or not. I liked going to war, however, because the management by crisis manager kept away from the front line and we lived in peace, paradoxically at the takling end of guns.
I was however brought up by a mother who managed her houselhold one crisis after another and made life miserable for the family over the years.
Now aged 77 and writing bookd on statehood and geopolitics, your I find your ideas interesting when putting into practise the principles of statehood.
Greetings
JRMS