— James E. Lukaszewski, ABC, APR, Fellow PRSA

Any organization, leadership or business decision that can involve conflict, confrontation, controversy and contention (the four ingredients of catastrophe) is by definition dangerous ground. All too often leadership planning and decision making tends to ignore, minimize, even discredit the power of these emotional circumstances. Think again.

Whenever any of the four ingredients of catastrophe begin to emerge, decision makers need to adopt a handful of crucial but achievable survival principles.

1. Avoid the production of new critics, victims and enemies. These players, once created, tend to live forever, remember everything and actively or surreptitiously, lie in wait to make your life miserable again and again going forward, often for reasons you’ll fail to remember.
2. Talk promptly. Failure to speak promptly on matters that can trigger any of the four ingredients of catastrophe, is a powerful failure that is unrecoverable. Whatever excuse an organization or its leaders use to forgive themselves for not speaking promptly is never credible, creates even more critics and victims which you may only learn about when they surface by surprise to disrupt something you want to accomplish. The most common criticisms of crisis response are the failure to speak (arrogance and hiding stuff) and the failure to act promptly (lack of empathy and callousness).
3. When in doubt, do something. Do it now, ask it now, say it now, change it now, fix it now. All too often really smart people seem timid, hesitant and confused. The tendency to stall, supported by the false imperative to get something done correctly, even perfectly, the first time, rarely happens. Your reputation is on the line from the very beginning. Timidity, hesitation and confusion are powerful, and reputationally corrosive. Far better to get something done and said today, even if significant repair is required tomorrow, than to do and say nothing today in hopes that inspiration will strike before something worse happens tomorrow. Something worse is always waiting to happen in crisis.

My philosophy is always to try and make next week’s mistakes this week, because that means that next week will be a better week with different but perhaps more helpful mistakes. Turns out that speed beats smart every time.
Continue Reading Avoiding the Seven Self-Inflicted, Destructive and Deceptive Industry (and Leadership) Behaviors that Create Victims, Critics and Often Enemies