In my aerospace job, I frequently told my team, "never waste a good crisis."
Crises were the best opportunities to get the NASA bureaucrats (or company bureaucrats) to suspend or bend the rules. We could turn their inherent conservatism and fear of something going wrong on their watch back on them. Instead of them worrying about following the regulations, they were worried about getting the blame if we couldn't fix the crisis.
Of course, we then did have to fix the crisis, but that was the fun part.
The subtle thing you mention about Wag is that crisis engineers are sometimes criticized for their behavior in the heat of the moment but are later (too late?) exonerated for having made the right decision. My personal experience in dealing with medical device software anomalies was similar. Perhaps we can learn something from Wag’s injection of a mini-crisis/phase transition into a bigger crisis to quell the polycrisis?
Regarding a crisis, see the rebuilding in the wake of the devastating La fires last January. Big challenges with the historically unprecedented absence of fema funding for infrastructure… also illustrates the craziness of californias convoluted water system
In my aerospace job, I frequently told my team, "never waste a good crisis."
Crises were the best opportunities to get the NASA bureaucrats (or company bureaucrats) to suspend or bend the rules. We could turn their inherent conservatism and fear of something going wrong on their watch back on them. Instead of them worrying about following the regulations, they were worried about getting the blame if we couldn't fix the crisis.
Of course, we then did have to fix the crisis, but that was the fun part.
Re Young Men and Fire - you might like Karl Weick's "The Collapse of Sensemaking in Organizations" which was based on the book.
https://www.cs.unibo.it/~ruffino/Letture%20TDPC/K.%20Weick%20-%20The%20collapse%20of%20sensemaking.pdf
We love that piece!
"You don’t achieve sensemaking by staring at a map; you achieve it by acting and observing results." Indeed. Amen. Thank you.
The subtle thing you mention about Wag is that crisis engineers are sometimes criticized for their behavior in the heat of the moment but are later (too late?) exonerated for having made the right decision. My personal experience in dealing with medical device software anomalies was similar. Perhaps we can learn something from Wag’s injection of a mini-crisis/phase transition into a bigger crisis to quell the polycrisis?
Regarding a crisis, see the rebuilding in the wake of the devastating La fires last January. Big challenges with the historically unprecedented absence of fema funding for infrastructure… also illustrates the craziness of californias convoluted water system