Never Waste A Good Crisis

Things get tough. You have made plans, but nothing is going as per plan. You feel murphy’s law has taken over. Everything that can go wrong is going wrong.

You are in a state of crisis, and all kinds of doomsday scenarios are playing out in your head.

“This is it. There is no way I can come out of this” Your mind is telling you.

I have been in this situation a few times in my career.

And whenever I have been there, I remember the advice of my mentor early in my career.

Never waste a good crisis.

Whenever a crisis hits you, it only means that there is something smarter and better you could have done, which you did not do. A crisis is a way of reminding you that you are not paying attention to tell-tale signals coming your way. Small niggling issues that compound to conflate into a full-blown crisis.

A crisis tests your resilience and systems- How organized are you with your information? How good is your planning? How responsive is your customer service? Etc.

When you remind yourself of this idea- never waste a crisis- your mind looks for opportunities to learn from whatever is going wrong. So instead of just reacting to and managing the crisis, you think about how you take out something positive from the situation so that you are better off once the crisis blows over?

If you pay attention, a crisis helps uncover fresh insights and points to opportunities to radically change and upgrade the way you operate. And, if you can do that you have managed to not waste a good crisis.